The responsibility here is with a spineless government. An executive order is not a law and a congress that did its job would quickly contract these kind of mad king declarations.
For example: the body of water between the UK and France. The UK calls it “the English Channel”. The French call it “la Manche”. It has no official international name. In Google Maps both names are used depending on what country/language you are using. Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.
Huh? Isn't that exactly what you've described? In the UK they show the popular usage in the UK, and the same in France.
Which matches popular usage in the respective countries. Your example is a non sequitir for explaining why matching popular usage can't possibly work.
For the popular usage of major geographical features to change is extremely rare, so I am skeptical that it's a huge amount of work to keep up with changes in popular usage. People made maps before they had automated pipelines for ingesting geographical names.
Or require an act of Congress. Obviously, we can no longer rely on Executive Orders being careful, thought-out, or lasting changes. Does any mapping organization want to change names back and forth? Does any user want to see these changes?
Yes, in this specific instance it would give us an outcome we want. But in the long term we’re replacing democratic government with corporate control. Which doesn’t seem good.