Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America

nytimes.com

40 points_doctor_love48 comments

The Google blog post is more useful: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/gni...

  The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" in the United States. Since we update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, which is GNIS for the U.S., people using Maps in the U.S. will see "Lake America," those in Canada will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names. These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.

Google is taking the heat for this because they have a fast engineering team that reacted within 48 hours. Based on the "Gulf of America, née Mexico" debacle, the other companies will follow suit when their engineering teams finish the code reviews: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14172#Technolo...

None of that GNIS US shit explains why people in the free world have to read "those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names"

In particular, their claim that they do this for all bodies of water with disputed names is a lie. They do it for some, but the Heilong River is called simply the "Amur River" on my map with no notice whatsoever of the longstanding Chinese name.

They're also taking the heat because it's a decision, and decisions carry moral weight. They're following their policy, but it's a policy they've chosen, not one that's legally compelled. It has implications, and they are free to reexamine and refine it. Not doing so is also a choice.

It has been obvious since Google pulled from China and got replaced by even more censored alternatives that corporations have close to zero weight against the arm of the state, and taking the moral high ground against an established government accomplishes close to nothing.

There's no "moral weight" to throw around. Until Google spins up a well-regulated militia, they do what the guys with guns tell them to do.

To their credit, they dropped the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago /s

Do you think Google maps made a moral choice to eg show different names for the Sea of Japan in Russia and Korea?

Perhaps they should not have reacted so quickly? The only US state which borders Lake Ontario rejects the name change, and US states are sovereign, so it’s not so obvious to me that the name change is official. But now it’s too late. Moving fast to comply with authoritarian mandates lends them a lot of power by undercutting anyone’s efforts to object.

You kind of need to be more specific about what you mean by sovereign. Federal pre-emption exists[0]. There are lots of ways in which the federal government can enforce their will (constitutionally!) on states.

But it's super complicated, and in this particular case does the state have some special right to name the body of water it's adjacent to that pre-empts the federal government? I dont know. Probably not, but I think the argument would need to be more explicit about what that right is rather than just claiming states are sovereign.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_preemption

Agreed! It's a complicated argument that would have required detailed discussion. But Google found it more politically convenient to bow to Trump and make it a fait accompli. Thus Trump makes an incremental step further towards his dreams of dictatorship. What will Google do when Trump tells them to rename a city, I wonder?

The rest of the world seeing both names is such a stupid decision. Please spare us from Trumps childish temper tantrums.

Actually, that by itself isn't as stupid as it seems. Half of Lake Ontario is in the USA. Suppose that the USA actually had a legitimate, long-standing, respected name for the lake, different from Lake Ontario. It would be a good idea to include that name in maps. It's not simply a USA-centric exonym for a foreign lake; the lake is in the USA! The users of a map deserve to know that the lake is called something else by people on the southern shore.

But Munich, Nuremberg, the Baltic Sea etc... are not shown with both their English vs local names either when setting the Google Maps language to English despite the German names being completely different (and the Baltic Sea would need at least three names: it is also called the 'Eastern Sea' and the 'Western Sea'), and in the Sorbian minority region of Germany, the place names are also not printed in both German and Sorbian.

The issue is not one of showing a native name plus an English-language exonym. For the time being, the lake has two native, English-language names. Neither name is an exonym. Lake Ontario is not a Canadian lake being called by a different name by the USA.

Now suppose Tramp decreed that The Great Bear Lake in Canada should be called Star-Spangled Lake, effectively making that the USA's exonym for a place in Canada. And then suppose Google showed that name to visitors outside the USA, along side The Great Bear Lake. That would then be like (or even worse than) showing English-languge exonyms for German places to someone whose language is not indicated as English.

No, they're taking the heat because they VERY selectively acted on this as quickly as possible while other issues they are more than happy to sit on. Don't confuse this for anything other than kissing the ring.

Couldn’t we, the rest of the world, continue to see Lake Ontario, as it was before? It’s a very stupid thing to do and I guess most of us, if asked, would be on team Canada..

And yet Google decided to have the whole planet (except Canada) see Lake America. The sucking up to Trump knows no bounds with Google and Apple (who will again follow suit as they did with Gulf of America)

"those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names"

As an American, I offer my apology to Canada for this action. It will be over in 2 more years, and we will rename it back.

Start swimming in Lake America, end up in Lake Ontario. Funnily enough, Ontario is an indigenous word that predates both American and Canadian governments.

> Ontario is a term thought to have Indigenous origins, either Ontarí:io, a Huron (Wyandot) word meaning "great lake", or possibly skanadario, which means "beautiful water" or "sparkling water" in the Iroquoian languages. Ontario has about 250,000 freshwater lakes. The first mention of the name Ontario was in 1641, when "Ontario" was used to describe the land on the north shore of the easternmost part of the Great Lakes. It was adopted as the official name of the new province at Confederation in 1867.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario

"Oops our Google Maps team is on vacation, an intern messed up the lake names microservice called "Lacus" and it is currently unavailable for changes. It will take the Google Maps team 2 years to make this change."

Thats how they could have pushed back against a dictator. Every finger you give him is a hand you lose.

I see it as "Lake Ontario (Lake America)" in the UK. This is so petty there must be a word for it in some language somewhere in the world.

In Australia, we call it bullshit.

same in the U.S.; unfortunately, the convicts are running the country now.

Incredibly embarrassing for Google.

That's a fun take. As a non-american, I see it as embarrassing for Americans, like most of what you let Trump do. Google is merely complying.

Only 30% of Americans approve of him. It's sad this number is so high, but that's partisan politics for you.

Yes, the other 70% of us do find it embarrassing.

Hopefully once Trump is gone there'll be a Roman-style "Damnatio memoriae" where all his vanity, and childish idiot, renaming is undone.

> Only 30% of Americans approve of him.

He got elected with 49.8% of the popular vote, even though he had already been in power and people knew reasonably well what his policies would be.

I guess it takes some people a long time to learn.

The signs of his corruption and sociopathic personality were there long before he got elected the first time. e.g. history of refusing to pay contractors who'd worked for him.

Maybe this was Google being cheeky for once. When I, a Canadian, dragged over the map, the Lake remained Lake Ontario.

When I search for Lake America, the pin sets itself directly over the same lake with the text "Lake America: The smallest of the five great lakes."

I hope this was intentional.

[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495947

https://archive.is/hllsk

My mnemonic for remembering the Great Lakes used to be HOMES. I've updated it to HAMES.

Move the S to the beginning of the word.

If you can't be magnanimous, be maganymous. Invent maganyms for places.

Page title is now "Google Maps Changes Lake Ontario to Lake America" which is probably more accurate than "Google Maps Renames Lake Ontario to Lake America" (which could've been the title earlier.

Trump renamed the lake. Google just updated the label.

It's yet another distraction from Epstein. Every insane and destructive action since January 2025 has been a distraction from Epstein and his clientele.

Trade war on your number one neighbor makes negative sense, unless you note that it has kept Epstein out of the news, despite forthcoming financial and other disclosures in civil suits. Senator Ron Wyden is hot on the financial trail, much as the financial trail brought down Al Capone, and it's to note that there have been some "no trial, no publicity" settlements by banks.

What if Canada changed the name to Lake Giuffre?

Big Brother and the party must rewrite history. (NOT)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49510464#49511011

Emmanuel Goldstein's work: From 1984 by George Orwell.

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM [0]

PDF download: [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_and_Practice_of_Oli...

[1] https://archive.org/download/the-theory-and-practice-of-olig...

But why do people think this? Do you think his supporters will be convinced if CNN shows unredacted files? Do you think they are just "unconvinced"? That they just need more evidence?

Trump said it himself. He could shoot someone on the street and they will still vote for him.

They don't hate hypocrisy, or pedophiles, or corruption, or big government or anything like that at all.

They hate "the weak". They hate a society which doesn't let them "Win". They won't stop doing that. Voting for Trump and watching him break things makes them feel powerful. They feel like "I did that"

Why not call it Lake Trump, hang a tarp blocking our view to it, and be done with it.

The American dream reduced to an idiocracy.

Probably saving it for an ocean.

I suspect the windfarm off of Scotland has highest priority

This is the dumbest thing. And we’ve had a lot of dumb things.

In the scope of things, this one is relatively harmless. Consider how many people even remember the Gulf of America name. These things distract from the real damage done by the administration, e.g. by killing offshore wind energy projects using taxpayer money, accelerating CO2 emission, and lowering drinking water purity and pollution standards.

Next up, he renames the Atlantic Ocean to Ocean of the Americas.

By far not the most impactful, of course.

But a remarkable demonstration of how rotten America has become, simply because it is so stupid.

The Gov't of Canada uses google maps and apparently don't have the country setting that dictates which version of Lake Ontario/America users see - so Canadians using their site get the US (Lake America).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/google-updates-maps-lake-onta...

Having experienced fed gov't IT projects I'm guessing it'll take 6-8 weeks and cost $500K-$750K to update that setting. /s

I never thought of Sundar Pichai as a loser before but ... here we are.

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