Google Maps Showing 'Lake America' in U.S.

28 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by hmokiguess
(macrumors.com)

42 Comments

taurath

2 hours ago

Fiduciary responsibility seems to mean that one has no choice but to follow orders if under threat - something that is worth remembering when it seems that corporate power is larger than state power.

Also shows how a lot of people making moves in the short term, especially if they “have no choice”, leads to acquiescence of totalitarianism. It seems we have no belief in collective power.

m4ck_

an hour ago

I hate it, but my guess is if they don't play ball here, they risk losing government contracts or worse, being blacklisted as a "supply chain threat" as they tried to do with Anthropic. Gov't/military canceling GCP and Gemini contracts probably wouldn't do well for their stock.

fatnoah

2 hours ago

FWIW, I worked on map rendering in a past life at another large tech company. General policy was to show "official" names and borders based on the user's country. It wasn't quite that clean, but IIRC there were a surprising number of disputed borders and place names in the world.

roosterIllusi0n

2 hours ago

Means nothing. Google changed before government data was updated. It was deliberate support of the change. Google is buying what they want by playing ball. It's time to break them up.

bigyabai

an hour ago

> It's time to break them up.

I don't know how to tell you this, but... pretty much the only reason why Apple/Google/Microsoft have escaped breakups comes down to their obedience to the feds.

bigstrat2003

2 hours ago

The country's government doesn't get to name geographic features. The people name it, and people are calling it Lake Ontario.

logancbrown

2 hours ago

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?edition=prelim&num=0&req...

cactacea

2 hours ago

What was the point you were trying to make by linking the executive order? The actual law simply states that the "Secretary of the Interior shall provide for uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography throughout the Federal Government".

cactacea

an hour ago

Just thinking out loud here but I wonder if there is a case to be made that by renaming Lake Ontario to something that nobody actually uses, the President has violated the law that requires "uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography". Not that anyone would have standing to actually get anywhere with that.

roosterIllusi0n

an hour ago

Reading that, we should all conclude that google is acting as an arm of the federal government.

mopsi

an hour ago

Most countries with a modern bureaucracy actually do maintain an official database of geographic feature names of some sort to ensure consistency in government documents. But their naming is not binding to anyone else, of course.

throwawayk7h

2 hours ago

The province Ontario was named after the lake, not vice versa. It's kind of absurd to rename this lake in particular just because it seems the least American-sounding.

toasty228

an hour ago

Americans will tell you to "go back to you country" even though they've been there for 3 generations or that they single handedly saved Europe during ww2, facts and history don't exist over here

roosterIllusi0n

an hour ago

That assumes maga crazies count as americans and not traitors.

inigyou

an hour ago

At what point during WW2 did you accept the fact that the average German was a devout Nazi?

willismichael

3 hours ago

Wouldn't it be enough to detect if the request is coming from a very specific subset of clients and send them what they want?

danans

3 hours ago

Why would they do that? Their goal is to stay in the good graces of the administration, to avoid financial or legal retribution.

If you think conscientious resistance is anywhere on the agenda of these corporations, I'd refer you to the inauguration photos and donation list, and the various acts of public supplication by their executives.

I don't even think it's wrong for them to do any of that - at least now the mask is off - but people should stop looking to corporations to take moral stances, despite their attempts over decades to convince you to attribute morality to them.

api

2 hours ago

I think looking at a for-profit corporation to take a moral stance is like expecting the police to plant trees, or the local school board to pave the roads, or the DMV to run health policy.

It's the wrong type of organization for that. It's not set up for it, its incentives are wrong, and its structure is wrong. Organizations are set up to do a certain job and structured and staffed to do that job.

It's why a functioning society needs multiple types of social organizations with different functions. Don't expect any organization to do what it wasn't made to do.

In this case, a public company is pretty much helpless against the US executive branch. One tweet from Trump could crash their stock. One investigation could wreck a major venture of theirs. One tariff could kill one of their major lines of business. So they're going to suck up because they have no power to do anything else.

mindslight

2 hours ago

The entire reason we treat corporations as independent entities, rather than as the extensions of the government that they are, is that they are supposed to be institutions executing on their own imperatives, and protected to do so under the rule of law. If owners and management of corporations can't take moral stances, then who else can do so at scale?

If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator (on an issue as simple as data provenance) because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start directly democratically regulating them - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.

danans

2 hours ago

> If we're really to the point that a trillion dollar megacorp can't stand up to a tinpot dictator because his xits might hurt their stock price, then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government,

Ironically, in this narrow way, the US is becoming more like China: authoritarian control in the functioning of corporations. In the case of the current US administration, it ends up being poorly thought out policies like broad tariffs without industrial policy to support them, and shallow nationalist stunts like this.

> then we need to drop this illusion that corpos are independent from the government, and start democratically regulating them directly - starting with stopping their blatant infringements of our natural rights as referenced in the Bill of Rights.

The only way this happens is if Congress claws back the power it had ceded to the Presidency (which the current administration has even overstepped). That will only happen when US voters start electing representatives who are not controlled by those corporations. We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.

mindslight

an hour ago

> We need to drop the narrative that the corporations and their executives are victims. They are being rewarded handsomely for their compliance.

I fully agree here! Although I think it's too kind to characterize it as "compliance". Once you get past the sheer incompetent and histrionic theatrics, this seems to be the primary goal behind the backers of Grumpism - keep destroying what's left of the US government so they can keep on expanding the scope of unaccountable corporate government based on unilaterally-set "policies".

bogomog

2 hours ago

Corporations are extensions of the government? I think an argument can be made for the opposite view (lobbying, the military-industrial complex, regulatory capture, DOGE) but I suspect the reality is tentacles of influence going in both directions.

mindslight

an hour ago

> Corporations are extensions of the government?

Yes, every US-domestic corporation has been chartered by a state government. Every corporation that operates in the US has gotten a license from each state it operates in. Corporations (/LLCs) aren't just mere groups of people, rather they have a government-created liability shield.

> the reality is tentacles of influence going in both directions.

I completely agree with this as well. Which is why when taking them to task we need to not stop at the line of "independent entities", where they can comfortably retreat to and regroup until the political time is ripe. For example one of the hopeful approaches to reforming Citizens United involves state laws that constrains what chartered/licensed corpos can do.

roosterIllusi0n

2 hours ago

Corporations are supposed to be regulated by the government, not be the government. Big tech acts like an arm of trump. Republicans don't want small government, they want weak government unable to stop corruption.

Google and others are demonstrating why them must be broken up.

mindslight

an hour ago

Yes, that would be one way to do it - split up their power so they don't have coercive power to infringe upon our natural rights. A proper approach to anti-trust enforcement is another issue I've thought about for a while. We shouldn't focus on market cap, number of users, or the number of products. What needs to happen is declaring that hardware, software, and services all independent markets and prohibiting tying between them - strike the root of their capturing Metcalfe's law and other sticky market effects. In other words - Google can continue to run GMail-the-service at the scale they do, but all the clients (even those delivered as JS over HTTPS) need to be implemented with only publicly-available APIs - a clean divide between the developers of GMail-the-service and GMail-the-client with no internal documentation or communication - API change notification that goes out publicly to the developers of all clients. And of course with email, anticompetitive actions for sending email to GMail-the-service need to be reigned in as well.

DANmode

3 hours ago

That’s exactly how it’s done IIRC.

They’re just treated as cultural localizations, internally.

vivzkestrel

3 hours ago

- they do this in india too, a different map of kashmir is shown depending on which country the person is viewing it from

zug_zug

2 hours ago

I feel like there's a way to make a policy that is "We update all geographies within America at 4 years, once a rename has had time to make it into the common parlance."

But whatever, every such scar he leaves will just be on the list of reminders of why he was the worst president in history, and likely haunt the party for decades.

ElijahLynn

2 hours ago

:sigh:

As an American, I offer my apology to Canada and the world for this action.

inigyou

an hour ago

Apology is meaningless. Do something.

ElijahLynn

an hour ago

Okay, I'll get right on that and have it changed back tomorrow. Thanks for the encouragement, that is all I needed.

/s

mindslight

2 hours ago

For the technicals, this is why data source malleability and decentralization is important, even if 99.9% of the time you never want to use it. How much needless sticky friction is there from people's workflows defaulting to "Google Maps" software, which has no option to actually pull up from this and let people decide "you know, this US GNIS doesn't seem very authoritative any more". Does OpenStreetMap show any inkling of propagating these stupid antics?

Politically, tell me again how the "unitary executive theory" (aka autocracy by any other name) is going to make our country "great" ? We're a fucking laughingstock - if this senile old man were in the correct venue of a memory care home, staff would have long ago learned to mitigate his behavior - and it's not like the rest of the world is blind to this! Instead the corpos and their stooges stuck him in the highest office in the land and let him loose from the rule of law, to destroy what last vestiges of Constitutional rights we have left. We're talking about what had been a straightforwardly trustable agency, now having that trust destroyed simply to preserve one idiot's ego after having been called on his bullshit.

ura_yukimitsu

2 hours ago

OpenStreetMap keeps a collection of tags for each node, including "official names," so in that sense it does include records of these arbitrary renamings, but there are rules about naming things and to solve disputes/edit wars[1] (most commonly, the "on the ground" rule that reflects real world usage[2]). For example, see the Gulf of Mexico node[3], its wiki page[4], and the discussion following the executive order to rename it[5].

[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes

[2]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Map_what's...

[3]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/305639190/history/143

[4]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Mexico

[5]: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-o...

ufcktrump

3 hours ago

Ufck Google. Ufck Trump. Ufck all you idiots that voted for the pedophile rapist.

copper-float

2 hours ago

Seems like he's living rent-free in your head every single day, that doesn't sound very healthy. You should stop being so angry.

If you hate him so much, the best thing you can do is ignore him completely. Do not give him any of your energy or time, instead of obsessing over him. A username like this is definitely on the obsessing side.

Screaming pointless obscenities into the void doesn't cause any change, it won't change any outcomes or minds. So why waste your time complaining on a random computer forum? Doesn't really make sense to me.

ura_yukimitsu

2 hours ago

I agree that HN is not the place for that, but on the other hand a lot of his policies have very real effects on a lot of people, so not everyone can afford to ignore him. And while this one policy doesn't really impact anyone, it does serve to prove to the rest of the world how self-centered he is.