U.S. President Donald Trump has asked Apple to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on its maps app, his administration’s interior chief said Monday, days after signing an executive order over the body of water now in the spotlight amid his escalating trade war with Canada.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox’s “Mornings with Maria” program that Trump “reached out to Apple directly.” He said he was confident the “Lake America” name could be seen on its platform soon.
Apple did not immediately comment in response. Only the Lake Ontario name appeared on its platform as of Monday afternoon.
Just over the weekend, competitor Google Maps rolled out the new “Lake America” name for U.S. users looking at the body of water that sits between the state of New York and Canada’s Ontario province. The company cited the recent order by Trump, and its already-established practice of using names assigned by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, also known as GNIS.
“People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google said in a brief statement on Saturday, reiterating that such updates “follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country.”
Trump declared the new “Lake America” name last week — marking one of the latest provocations during his trade war with Canada that is now hiking tariffs on both sides of the border. His executive order on Friday directed the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service.
The president cannot force Canada to follow along, however. And America’s northern neighbors quickly panned the idea. The leader of the Seneca Nation in upstate New York also said the move violates a more than 225-year-old treaty and shows a “blatant disrespect” for the Indigenous people who gave Lake Ontario its name in the first place.
Look, I’m not going to tell anyone to not stop using google maps, but the US isn’t the first country to insist on their own name for something, and google maps just has a routine policy for dealing with that situation. The country is flagged as “sensitive” and they make it say whatever that country insists on calling it. Virtually everything has multiple names depending on the country you’re in.
Google is American company, one of the biggest and most influental. Americans take big pride in not being ruled by dictators. But this is the same as some dictator renaming things left and right. There is no popular movement behind this AFAIK. So a big company going along even when they could choose not to sends a message.
I think what I don’t like is this implicit personification of corporations. Behaving as though they’re a single being, like they have a nationality, and they decide things as a single, shitty person. But corporations are not people, they are hiveminds. Google is an American company because they incorporated in America and no other reason, any American pride is held by individuals working at the company, not by any entity called “Google” and certainly not by the executives at the helm who can live anywhere they want on a whim.
People say things like “Google did this because it likes fascism”, but that’s our stupid monkey brain assigning intention to an observed cause and effect. In reality, there is a thoughtless system in place for handling this routine situation. The paperwork came across someone’s desk, they changed the string for a geofenced region like they always do, and then they clocked out and stopped thinking about it.
There is no “American pride” built into the system, and any special treatment of a situation you see isn’t “Google making the right decision”, it’s their PR system doing its job.
I get why you are trying to say. The other side of the coin is that tech companies are providing public space where lots of politics happen. Furthermore they are eager to be in good relations with any government so they aren’t impartial subjects. Notable examples: invaguration donations, Oracle and TikTok forced sale. They never were a neutral platform, before 2024 USA elections it was rightwing screeching about their political slant. Now its reversed.
Exactly, they are going whichever way the wind blows, whatever looks like profit. They’re not pro-fascism, they’re not pro-liberalism, they’re not even pro-capitalism if it means competition hurts their bottom line. AI companies are currently openly trying to get the US to own a stake in their companies, because that means it’s in the US’ interest to write laws that favor them, and to bail them out later when the bubble pops. And though that looks to the layperson like the state owning the means of production, they are also not pro-communism. They are pro-profit, and everything else is left undefined.
And their PR/localization system is fundamentally flawed and causes them to bend the knee to fascism. I wonder why they haven’t changed that process?
This isn’t about personification of Google or Apple. It’s about their systems, leadership, and processes that enable bending the knee.
You say you’re not personifying them, while also invoking the imagery of them as a person kneeling. Do you see my point yet?
A corporation is not a person. It doesn’t “bend its knee”. It is a system of cause and effect without any intentionality other than “maximizing profits”. Saying a corporation is bending the knee is like saying an LLM is apologetic for gas lighting you.
Google didn’t change the name of the lake because “it likes fascism”, it happened because it was profitable.
I don’t think there’s any disagreement on this point, I just want people to keep it in mind, because otherwise the next action Google takes isn’t going to make any sense. It might be something broadly perceived as anti-fascist, and all the commenters are going to say, “well, I guess Google had a change of heart. They must want to be on the right side of history.” And my point is: no, it’s always the same machine with the same goal.
Bend the knee is an expression, and groups and organizations can definitely do so. Just because it’s a group or organization deciding to do practices which are in line with fascism doesn’t mean they aren’t bending the knee. You are semantically taking the expression of “bend the knee” as a literal and not figuratively. Bend the knee is almost never used to describe someone literally bending their knee for someone else.
At multiple points, I have emphasized that people should never forget that Google was on the wrong side of history.
Imagery is figurative by definition. I understand the expression.
It is used to describe intention. A person bends the knee when they intend to serve some other party’s interests.
To continue the LLM comparison: you prompt it a question, it’s response is not accurate, you say “that’s made up”, it says “I’m sorry, you’re right, I made that up”. Did something actually just apologize to you? No, of course not. There is no intention behind the words “I’m sorry”, it’s just an algorithm minimizing an error term, and the characters
[I, m, s, o, r, r, y]were the solution. Importantly, if you ask the same question again, there’s no telling whether it will give the wrong answer or right answer, and either way, it wasn’t because of some intent to be more or less accurate.In the same way, there is no intention behind Google’s actions regarding this renaming other than to maximize a profit term. There is no intention to serve or resist a fascist state. Tomorrow their actions will not be correlated with today’s actions except to the degree that they maximize profit, and they should not be confused for the intentions of some intangible sentient entity called “Google”.
I’m painfully aware of how LLMs function, I’m unfortunately in the IS industry. It doesn’t change the fact that corporations can and do assist fascist states when they see fit, either for profit or for the personal goals of those in charge. It’s a bad example to make your point to be honest, because while an LLM has no living parts and is not able to think, companies are made up of living, thinking human beings with their own ideals. A company is not a person, they’re groups of them though. And thanks to the supreme court and US government, in the US, they sometimes have more rights than an individual does.
Intent does not matter - the result is the same, that they’re assisting with fascism. They are “bending the knee”. There is nothing with that expression that necessarily requires explaining intent, it can exist on its own or with intent. Bending the knee is an action with results, it’s not necessarily an intent, although it certainly can be.
I acknowledge that they are profit driven, but these companies are also run and operated by billionaires who have their own personal interests, including authoritarianism. This shows in their leader’s personal actions and how the companies lobby. While most of it is to drive profit and “make line go up”, you also have sick fucks like Peter Thiel who use their wealth to spread their own ideals. He spreads those ideals by convincing billionaire company owners like Musk to further spread authoritarianism through lobbying and company policy.
The point is not these semantics that you keep bringing up when we are on the same page. The point is that, intentional or not (and reasoning aside), they are doing what a fascist wants, using the power that they have to spread misinformation and falsehoods. They have the power to not fall in line, and instead are being good lapdogs to Trump. That is what people need to remember, regardless of intention.
You bringing intention into this is exactly the excuse they will use if Trump & Co ever lose power: that they had no intention of helping authoritarianism, that they were just looking out for shareholders, that their guidelines were broad enough to allow outsiders to influence changes on their platform, etc. That line of thinking is exactly what should be avoided, they will say anything to make their “line go up”. The reasoning doesn’t matter when the result is helping a fascist state be fascist.
Yes, I made this point above. I assume you aren’t suggesting a majority of the individuals working for Google, meta, Twitter, OpenAI, etc. are pro fascist. Yet without them, they would not achieve any of their fascist goals. So how is that possible?
And my point is that it’s not always the same. In the near future, Google or some other corporation, will do something notably anti-fascist. And you’ll be in a thread about it surrounded by commenters saying “I’m buying from this company now, because they get it!” And you’ll be trying to explain why that’s not how it works using functionally the same points I’m making here.
We don’t have to imagine, there are tons of companies who helped the Nazis who are still household brands today. Are those fascist corporations? All the individuals from back then are dead. Are they still fascist? If not, when did they change? I contend that none of them have ever changed, because none of them hold any ideology.
Ascribing personalities to corporations is a phenomenon our primitive brains are fooled into, because we didn’t evolve to understand what a corporation is. It’s the same phenomenon as when people form relationships with LLMs.
Good luck in that next thread.
What you’re describing is generally referred to as localization. Executive orders are not country wide, and no one outside of the executive branch is required to follow them. Because of that, they are not able to make them nationally recognized, as that would require an act of congress. Even then, it will not ever be internationally recognized since that would require the relevant parties to agree on the change.
Organizations have varied approaches to localization. For example, OSM’s guidelines center around either official or common names for map features. Trump’s names are not official outside of the executive branch, and are not commonly used by anyone. This means the original names have remained the primary name tag, even inside the US.
MapQuest, while I don’t know their guidelines, is also on the side of not changing names of international festures based on an executive order.
This isn’t just a localization thing. The problem, at the root, is that either Google’s localization guidelines are loose enough to force them to bend the knee for fascists, or, more likely, Google wants to continue to glaze up Trump, and is therefore more than happy to bend the knee. Either way, the result is the same.