Trump's lake order binds no company, so Google and Apple raced to comply and the AP just didn't.

…(cont) Corporate spine did not wait for a legal opinion, a subpoena, or a strongly worded letter. Google relabeled the lake within three days, on its own initiative, citing a federal database it was under no compulsion to consult. It was preceded in death by Apple Maps, which followed by that Tuesday — beaten to the capitulation, but not by much, and not for lack of trying.

The mourners arrived this week in the shape of two cartoon fourth-graders. "South Park" renamed itself "South America," aiming the joke at Apple, Google, and, its creators noted, their own corporate parent. It is penny-ante institutional courage when the sharpest rebuke to two trillion-dollar map providers comes from a basic-cable cartoon with three decades of lawsuits behind it — but the joke asked no legal team's permission, and it landed anyway.

Corporate spine is survived by the Associated Press style desk, which said this week it will keep calling the lake what the people beside it have always called it, on the grounds that an order about federal usage is not a memo to a wire service. No further obligation was ever required. That was, this whole time, the point.

In lieu of flowers, ask your map who it answers to before you trust it with your next address.