Here we go again.
Last week the U.S. president did to Lake Ontario what he did to the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half ago: rename it after America. This was part of an ongoing hissy fit against a country—my country—for walking away from trade talks due to demands from the U.S. side that were literally unacceptable.
It was meant to bait us, and in general Canadians have not taken it well (responses ranging from can you believe this doofus to it’s fucking go time). Doug Ford put up a big sign. Blue Rodeo fans screamed the lake’s name at a concert. Our prime minister, Mark Carney, refused to take the bait, issuing the following statement via social media channels:
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.
Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario—then, now and always.
That’s dry enough that my country’s entire vermouth supply spontaneously combusted. (And yes, we have a leader who can use the word “hydronym” in a social media post.)
Google is complying with Trump’s directive, doing with Lake Ontario what it did with the Gulf of Mexico: show it as Lake America in the U.S., Lake Ontario in Canada, and as Lake Ontario (Lake America) in the rest of the world. This is not a surprise. I’m not happy that Google complied, but I understand it. Google uses GNIS as a data source, and GNIS changes are updated automatically. Google also makes a point of not taking sides on map controversies. As I wrote about Google’s compliance with the Gulf of Mexico nonsense,
I’m not sure why some people were expecting Big Tech to lead the resistance (especially a trillion-dollar company), and over one of the easiest things to undo once this is all over: Google has made a point of accommodating government requests on its maps, showing the “right” borders and place names to the right users. See previous post: Google Maps as Non-State Authority.
As Micah points out in this Bluesky thread, it would be a bad idea if Google decided it could manually override stupid decisions like this or take sides in a border dispute. We really don’t want Google to have the sole power to decide place names and borders! The problem, says Micah, “is that we elected a dipshit and the dipshit has the power to order name changes in GNIS.” This is, in other words, an America problem, not a Google problem, and the problem will never be limited to Google. If Trump decides to unleash his inner Niyazov and starts renaming months and days of the week after himself, it’s not an Outlook problem if your next meeting is scheduled for next Trumpday the trumpteenth of Trumptember, it’s an America problem.
That said, once the change was made in Google Maps, Google suddenly had a Canada problem, because Canadian government and institutional websites that embedded Google Maps suddenly showed “Lake America” despite Google Maps itself showing “Lake Ontario” in Canada: see e.g. CTV News, Global News. This made Canadians even ornerier, to say nothing of the institutions the websites belonged to. Much talk ensued about data sovereignty, relying on a foreign map provider beholden to the U.S. government, and finding a non-U.S. mapping platform. Not that such talk isn’t a bad idea in these times, but it turns out that the cause—and fix—were both mundane and straightforward.
What happened was that web developers had been embedding Google Maps without setting the region to Canada, so the maps defaulted to the U.S. version of the map: see this CBC News story at 2:08. Developers hadn’t bothered setting the region: it’s optional, and not doing so hadn’t been a problem before this nonsense started. Setting the region to Canada restores “Lake Ontario,” and the proper name is now starting to reappear on the websites in question.
Apple took a little longer to follow Google’s lead, but did so as of today. I never expected Apple to act any differently from Google, especially since Trump personally contacted them about it, and their business lines are too vulnerable to arbitrary retaliation.
As someone whose country is currently on the receiving end of Trump’s arbitrary retaliation, I get it.
MapQuest, on the other hand, is taking this as another opportunity to stand out by refusing the name change, launching a tool to rename Lake Ontario to accompany the one for the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, the MapQuest app is soaring in popularity on the iOS App Store. Unfortunately this is a case where MapQuest benefits from being far too unimportant for Trump to care about. MapQuest can afford to defy Trump.
Featured image: Detail from Henry Pope, A Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements adjacent thereto (1733), David Rumsey Map Collection.