RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Trump issued the executive order on Thursday as part of an ongoing feud over tariffs with Canada, whose province of Ontario borders the lake. It followed a similar order he issued in January 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as part of a fight with the US trading partner to the south.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other maps providers adopted the Gulf of America naming as soon as the US Department of the Interior updated its records, which came a couple of weeks after Trump’s order. So it was no surprise that when those records—which are used to determine names on roadway signs and in government literature—reflected Lake America, digital maps from Google also quickly took on the new name.
Apple Maps and Bing Maps have not yet reflected the change but are expected to. In fact, the map for the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System database, which informs these changes, still showed Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning, with a note that the maps are “in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.”
While Google and other private organizations that provide maps are not bound by law to use official names, they generally follow government databases like GNIS. The location names a user sees depends on their own geography.
“People using Maps in the US will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the US and Canada will see both names,” Google said in an unsigned statement. “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.”
Trump’s efforts to rewrite maps have generated considerable public debate in open-source mapping communities such as OpenStreetMap, whose technology is used by companies such as Uber and Lyft. Ultimately, OpenStreetMap recognizes both the US and foreign names and gives organizations using its maps the choice over which to show.
One map provider that has so far declined to make the change is MapQuest, which said in a social media post in response to Trump’s order, “We’re not changing it.”
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