Google Maps renames “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America” even faster than US government

Google rolled out the Lake America change on Saturday, while the official US government maps are still waiting.

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/google-maps-renames-lake-ontario-to-lake-america-even-faster-than-us-government/

So fwiw, the change was made official and updated in GNIS the day it changed on Google Maps, which uses GNIS behind the scenes. That same day, USGS said the name had taken effect in GNIS but that it was waiting for its maps to visually update.

I think this is a product of Google’s infrastructure being faster to automatically update with GNIS changes. The fact they didn’t step in to override it already shows that they’re willing to go along with this; I don’t think the fact it changed before USGS adds any significance to that bootlicking.

That is, I don’t assume Google manually intervened to make this happen faster.

Still, fuck Google Maps. I’m glad people are waking up to how this level of hegemony over maps gives corporations too much power.

I wish this was talked about more. So much hay being made about this on the assumption that Google maintains their own database of locations instead of pulling from sources like GNIS like they actually do.

Fuck Google, but we don’t need to make shit up to hate them. In fact, making shit up makes us seem crazy and hurts our position. These companies do enough real evil shit, we don’t need to piss our time away on this non-issue.

Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example. I’ve seen way more mainstream news about this one item on a fucking map than I have about the loss of sideloading and the loss of actual ownership of the devices we purchase.

Where’s this fucking energy for Google removing sideloading from Android, for example.

To be fair, the average person doesn’t know what sideloading is, while everyone will look at the map and see the changed name