Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I am Canadian. It is and it will stay Lake Ontario.

I am mad at Google for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. A map should represent the current reality. Google Maps defaults to the user’s local reality, which seems reasonable to me.

I worked at a mapping company and we had similar setups for contested borders. You would get the map that your government accepts. It was not the company’s prerogative to weigh in on those issues.

Remember that if Google Maps has to weigh in on obvious nonsense, it will also need to weigh in on far trickier issues, and at their scale, it might affect the outcome. This sort of legal neutrality seems like a better line of conduct to me.

View on HN

I'm also Canadian. The nuance here is that this is not an average contested border or naming issue that mapping companies rightfully treat very carefully. There is no actual dispute between two peoples or two nations, or anyone, on what this landmark is called. The 'dispute' is that one man decreed it and everyone else bowed in respect and whispered "Yes sir Mr. President". If he decreed that the new standard of calling other countries in the US was to prepend "Future American Territory of" to their names or that the word "ocean" was being changed to "big American water", Google would have the changes rolled out by the end of the day for Americans, and would show the glorious new name in parentheses for the rest of the world.

I argue that using 'rules' against an entity that knows no rules is futile. Everyone pretends that things are going swimmingly and that the rules-based world order is alive and well, that if we just use enough rules and never make difficult choices that go against them, the threat will eventually go away. This is partially what allowed it to happen in the first place. As it stands now, obeying these orders isn't neutrality, it's enabling.

What would be a valid basis for relabeling a shared body of water for US users?

Would it be based on popular usage? The procedure by which it changed? Maybe we distinguish between bicameralism and presentment, an executive order, and the discretion of a bureaucrat. Or do we normally take the government database at its word but treat this as a sui generis "this guy is being an asshole" exception?

Not trying to interrogate you specifically. I am pondering these questions myself. I don't like that the name changed but I'm hard pressed to think of a good neutral policy that doesn't also sweep up a bunch of (far stickier) renaming situations around the world.

I'll elaborate on my opinion. I think that asking for a single universal rule that seemingly impartially decides how to display certain names shows that I conveyed what I meant too indirectly. Asking for a universal rule on map labeling is like asking someone to design a universally applicable test that can be taken by both a human and a gorilla. Universal rules will never work or be impartial because you can't assume everyone is a well-intentioned actor.

The real solution here is for Google to decide on their values. What they think is right, why they think that, and who they back because of it. Only that would help them distinguish between genuine conflicts and a temper tantrum, both domestically and internationally.

Of course, doing this would be extremely controversial and as a corporation they would never go for it anyway. What it would do is show their position to the world openly and let people judge them on that merit and decide if they really want to work with them. Applying universal rules that 'accidentally' happen to help a certain side is just as much of a political and ideological choice as what I've suggested above, it's just a lot more wishy-washy and coated in a pretense of rationality.

Google can take months or YEARS to make updates but this one it makes almost immediately? Don't confuse this for anything but kissing the ring.

Really? I thought Maps was pretty constistently up to date with GNIS changes.

GMaps can be extremely slow when it comes to responding to user reports, or updating regional info like road networks or new subdivisions. A lot of that comes down to the fact that Google relies on government entities for authoritative information, which can mean waiting months or years for the local government to provide new info. The federal government updated this one quickly.

In my local area Google Maps is still missing some rather crucial elements of a high-throughput road, which were added to OpenStreetMaps almost two years ago.

A bit hyperbolic dont you think? Even if you disagree with the politics, you'd agree that updating a random restaurant's opening hours is different from updating a national landmark.

For instance, I checked Nepal area and Google Maps already shows the area as flood affected. It didnt take years.

> A map should represent the current reality. Google Maps defaults to the user’s local reality

Does it though? It’s showing the new name in every country except Canada. They could have limited this rename to USA only, but they didn’t.

I live in Germany. It shows as Lake Ontario here.

What makes you think that? It says Lake Ontario here in the UK.

What makes me think that is the article being discussed. It says “Lake America” will be shown everywhere (though parenthetically) everywhere except Canada.

EU citizen here:

For us it still says Lake Ontario :-)

Not sure what Trump is looking forward to win with all these moves?

> Not sure what Trump is looking forward to win with all these moves?

He just floods the media and everyone’s minds with a constant stream of junk.

Some is consequential, some is not. Either way, the stream is so continuous it is distracting from the actual important things he’s covering up (raping kids, creating his own extremely well funded gestapo, kidnapping presidents, murdering fishermen, fucking up a war he started, stealing the election, etc)

He's done the math- this kind of moves is exactly what retains support from 30% of the US population - enough to sway elections.

Yes but the gulf of Mexico shows both names, which i don't understand... Why are we seeing the BS fake name in the EU at all?

One kicker is how many sites leveraging Google Maps API in Canada are showing "Lake of America". I'm not sure if that's because they're proxying the Google Maps requests through a US server, or they're using an API call to specifically request the US version of the map. But either way, it's a pretty bad faux pas, especially for oligarchic telcos that wrap themselves in the flag when they're begging for protection from international competitors.

This is where my position gets more nuanced. The default value should still be Lake Ontario, because that's what most of the world recognises it as. It's the most neutral name for it.

In general, I don't like that the world defaults to the Silicon Valley version of reality.

I mean is it the API or is it the website provider's metadata? I don't know anything about the gmaps API. I would assume the default locale would be that of the requester, not US (but then I know MS has the "Invariant locale" which is often best-practice, which is de-facto US... not sure if Google has similar).

We just got a bug in our app for this, you basically have to add `region=CA` when instantiating maps API, otherwise it defaults to something hmm, else (some says US, but in EU we clearly see Ontario, so there is some geoguessing or other mechanism behind)

Nice. TIL

Reply on news.ycombinator.com