Three map apps, three responses so far to President Trump’s order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America amid an escalating trade war with Canada.
Google changed the lake’s name on its Maps application two days after the Aug. 27 executive order was signed, at least for users in the United States. MapQuest publicly refused to make the update, while Apple on Tuesday began to adopt the new name.
And the tech companies’ decisions seem to matter to Mr. Trump. He had reached out to Apple to ask it to make the change, according to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“I know that the president reached out to Apple directly,” Mr. Burgum told Fox News on Monday.
Mr. Burgum also said that when place names are ordered to be changed, staff at the Board of Geographic Names “plug that into the software, and then that software cascades down, so all the map providers would do that.”
Noting that the name Lake Ontario is 400 years old, Prime Minister Mark J. Carney of Canada said on social media, “Naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario — then, now and always.”
As of Tuesday evening, the Apple Maps app displayed “Lake Ontario” over the body of water, but the app listed it as Lake America. It does show the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America: Mr. Trump ordered that change just after he was inaugurated in January 2025. Google and Apple made the change on their map apps within a month. MapQuest continues to display the Gulf of Mexico.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Google said in a statement: “We update Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources.” American users will see Lake America; users in Canada will continue to see Lake Ontario; and others will see both names displayed, the company said.
The dispute provided an unexpected boost to MapQuest, a pioneering site from the ’90s that had fallen largely into disuse as Google and Apple boomed. It put up a four-word social media post, “We’re not changing it” along with a map labeled “Lake Ontario.”
MapQuest was downloaded 80,000 times on Apple’s iOS platform on Sunday, Forbes reported, citing Appfigures, a market intelligence company. In early August, that figure was around 500 daily downloads on average.
“One basic problem for the mapping companies is that there is no single uncontested authority to defer to,” said David R. Rain, a professor of geography at George Washington University. Map companies must make their own decisions when there is a conflict.
Showing different names to different users depending on their location “may seem like an elegant technical solution,” he said. “But it raises a big huge cartographic question. Is a map telling us what a government calls a place, or what the people who live there call it?”
Noting the increase in downloads for MapQuest after it took a stand against Lake America, Derek H. Alderman, a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, said that many people wanted map companies to “take a moral stand” on the matter. It matters to them, he said, adding, “Maps and their name places help define the world we come to live in and know.”
“Although map tech companies appear on the surface to be simply about delivering the latest and most accurate geographic information, they are actually deeply involved in the politics of representing the earth and shaping whose histories and identities are given visibility and legitimacy on maps. This is the true pressure and responsibility under which map tech companies work.”
