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Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I worked on map rendering in a past life at another large tech company. General policy was to show "official" names and borders based on the user's country. It wasn't quite that clean, but IIRC there were a surprising number of disputed borders and place names in the world.

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Means nothing. Google changed before government data was updated. It was deliberate support of the change. Google is buying what they want by playing ball. It's time to break them up.

> It's time to break them up.

I don't know how to tell you this, but... pretty much the only reason why Apple/Google/Microsoft have escaped breakups comes down to their obedience to the feds.

The country's government doesn't get to name geographic features. The people name it, and people are calling it Lake Ontario.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=prelim&num=0&req...

What was the point you were trying to make by linking the executive order? The actual law simply states that the "Secretary of the Interior shall provide for uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography throughout the Federal Government".

Just thinking out loud here but I wonder if there is a case to be made that by renaming Lake Ontario to something that nobody actually uses, the President has violated the law that requires "uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography". Not that anyone would have standing to actually get anywhere with that.

Reading that, we should all conclude that google is acting as an arm of the federal government.

Huh?

Most countries with a modern bureaucracy actually do maintain an official database of geographic feature names of some sort to ensure consistency in government documents. But their naming is not binding to anyone else, of course.

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