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.
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.