Google updated its Maps application on Sunday in adherence with an executive order President Donald Trump signed on Thursday that renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America. Titled, “Honoring the American history of the Great Lakes and renaming…
Page B1From§Eachthe late evening edition — 30 August 2026
Google Maps renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America' after Trump executive order.
As it ran on the front
LAKE ONTARIO, a body of water, died this week at the apparent age of roughly eleven thousand years, following complications from an executive order. It was renamed 'Lake America' by Google Maps, which cited compliance with a directive out of Washington, and just like that, the name was gone.
Lake Ontario was born of a retreating glacier, back when nobody was around to file the paperwork, and it spent its working life doing the job lakes do: holding water, marking a border, minding its business between two countries that mostly got along. It was the smallest of the five Great Lakes by surface area, which never bothered it, and the last one before the water finally reached the sea.…
…(cont) It is survived by Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior, none of which, as of this writing, have been renamed, though the family has been asked not to get comfortable. It is preceded in death by the Gulf of Mexico, which went by 'Gulf of America' on the same maps, for the same reasons, under the same order.
Friends describe Lake Ontario as reliable, binational, and entirely uninterested in politics, which in the end did not save it. A spokesperson for Google Maps confirmed the change was made to reflect the executive order and declined to comment further, which is corporate for 'we checked, and yes, this is real.'
There will be no service. The lake, notably, has not moved; it remains exactly where it has always been, between New York and Ontario, doing the same work under the new name it did under the old one, which is either a small mercy or the whole point, depending who you ask.
This paper has covered a great many deaths in its time — norms, programs, the occasional streak — but it is not every week a paper gets to write the obituary of a lake. It is, this writer will admit, a bit of malarkey, renaming a shared border like a hotel changes its carpet, but the water does not care what we call it, and neither, apparently, does the company that draws the map.
In lieu of flowers, ask your representative whether renaming a shared border is legislation or a mood.
“They didn't ask anybody who lives on that shoreline, they just renamed the water on a phone app and called it done. The same order took the Gulf of Mexico's name too, and nobody voted on either one. Next time you look up directions, remember the map itself now takes orders from the same guy running the country.”
“This is a private company's cartography decision, Google Maps updates labels constantly, it's not a big — okay, it's tied to an executive order, but companies comply with government directives all the time, that's not a scandal, that's Tuesday. I wouldn't call it a rename so much as a, huh, it's definitely a rename.”
The receipts
Tech giant Google faced widespread criticism over the weekend for becoming the first major online map provider to change the name of "Lake Ontario" to "Lake America" for its US users, after President Donald Trump ordered the name change in…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.