Google announced that it had begun rolling out changes to how its maps display Lake Ontario's name, after President Trump signed an executive order changing it to "Lake America."
Page A7From§Eachthe milkman edition — 31 August 2026
Google renames Lake Ontario 'Lake America' days after Trump says 'I don't want Canadian anything'
As it ran on the front
I want to be clear from the outset: this is not a story about a President renaming a body of water that two sovereign nations have shared, amicably, for roughly two hundred years. This is a story about routine cartographic housekeeping at a private technology company, which happens to have occurred — coincidentally, I stress coincidentally — within days of an executive order and a presidential statement that he does not want, quote, 'Canadian anything.'
Now, some critics will say Google Maps updating 'Lake Ontario' to 'Lake America' for U.S. users is a capitulation. I reject that framing entirely. Google is a private company. Private companies make private decisions about how to label things they did not previously — did I say 'did not previously' — hold on. That's not — obviously the lake had a name. It's had the name Ontario since before there was a Google, arguably before there was an America. That's not a great point for me to make. Strike that.…
…(cont) What I mean to say is: naming rights over a shared freshwater lake are best resolved through diplomatic channels, not unilateral relabeling by a search engine responding to a decree. I did not mean to imply that is what happened. What happened is Google 'adopted' the name, per its own language, 'after' the executive order — the 'after' there is purely chronological, not causal. Correlation, causation, you understand the distinction, I'm sure you do.
And when the President says he doesn't want 'Canadian anything,' while the lake in question is, geographically, half Canadian — that is a rhetorical flourish, not a foreign policy. It is not a claim on Canadian territory. It is not that. I want to be on the record that it is not that, even though I cannot currently think of what else it would be.
Look. Somewhere in Ottawa, someone is looking at an American company's map and seeing their own lake with a new coat of paint they did not ask for, did not vote on, and cannot undo with an app update of their own. That's not a diplomatic incident. That's a UI change. I've said that three times now and it's getting harder to say with a straight face, so I'm going to stop here and let the map speak for itself, which, apparently, is exactly what it's been asked to do.
“So a search engine just renamed a five-hundred-mile lake because a man in Washington got his feelings hurt about a country. That's not cartography, that's compliance — a company that maps three billion phones bending its atlas to a mood. Watch how fast 'the customer is always right' turns into 'the President is always right' the moment he signs an order.”
“Look, this is just Google respecting an executive order, which is not the same as respecting the President, though obviously — no, what I mean is, renaming a shared international body of water is routine cartographic housekeeping that in no way signals anything about — that's not what I — the point is, it's just a name.”
The receipts
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…
President Trump said Sunday he does not want U.S. businesses to import Canadian goods amid continued tariff tensions between the two countries. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said his tariffs “revived, and indeed saved” the American…
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.