People think they have their back (because OSM is showing Lake Ontario), but it's just marketing.
So… Google, then?
It's not like it hasn't been repeatedly documented that malware is pushed through Google Ads and other properties.
The concept of searching a bunch of search engines made sense to me.
It made sense to somebody else[0], too.
never mind looks like they got swallowed up by bing maps (that’s where Bing got line drive from, TIL!)
Dictators make spurious announcements in order to see who obeys and who doesn't, and then punish those who didn't, in order to further their own grip on power.
Whether the dictator does this one time, or a million times, each time matters. Each time you obey the dictator, other people see you obeying the dictator, which is you handing your credibility to the dictator. It entrenches them further. See The Power of the Powerless for how it played out in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless#Hav...
> Havel uses the example of a greengrocer who displays in his shop the sign Workers of the world, unite! Since failure to display the sign could be seen as disloyalty, he displays it and the sign becomes not a symbol of his enthusiasm for the regime, but a symbol of both his submission to it and humiliation by it.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/hono...
It's part of the "flood the field with bullshit" scheme of Steve Bannon
> The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1171557898746...
Because my parent comment said that he was throwing a tantrum. I don't see any evidence that he is balling his eyes out, trashing the Oval Office, or screaming. The order is not written in childish frustration, but in a professional tone.
These actions are not commonplace. This is not how you run a country. The long held names of bodies of water with international neighbors are now suddenly up for changes on a whim. No discussion, no convincing, just I say so.
This is intentional manipulation
Or reaming stadiums (which get updated on maps) for sponsorships, renaming towns for sponsorships… we have a never ending stream of renamings to be mad at and wave our ineffectual fists at.
Second, I don't think anyone is losing sleep at night over this, except for maybe Trump.
But third, yes, some of us do like, in our own small and quiet ways, not to cooperate with pettiness, arbitrary authority, and executive overreach.
Looking at a FuriLabs FLX1S to start the next phase by switching to a Linux phone.
I've become a sunk cost to Google by not spending anything on their products or services and always use Ad-Block solution in a private session if I must.
And for things like official geographic names, government naming databases are often one of the authoritative upstream sources. So if the U.S. government changes the name in its official geographic database, it’s not surprising for that change to eventually propagate through map providers and into Bing.
I wonder if Bing is worth it for them to still operate because of the people paying to use the index.
It's ad companies all the way down.
Y’all good with a president who changes a 400 year old name on a hissy fit and spends his days shitposting at the level of "dumb teenage boy"?
Review wise, it sits firmly at a single star, so it's possible that Google burried it, although I would not put it past them to rig things.
The responsibility here is with a spineless government. An executive order is not a law and a congress that did its job would quickly contract these kind of mad king declarations.
Or require an act of Congress. Obviously, we can no longer rely on Executive Orders being careful, thought-out, or lasting changes. Does any mapping organization want to change names back and forth? Does any user want to see these changes?
Yes, in this specific instance it would give us an outcome we want. But in the long term we’re replacing democratic government with corporate control. Which doesn’t seem good.
For example: the body of water between the UK and France. The UK calls it “the English Channel”. The French call it “la Manche”. It has no official international name. In Google Maps both names are used depending on what country/language you are using. Choosing one via popular usage would not be a good solution.
Huh? Isn't that exactly what you've described? In the UK they show the popular usage in the UK, and the same in France.
Which matches popular usage in the respective countries. Your example is a non sequitir for explaining why matching popular usage can't possibly work.
For the popular usage of major geographical features to change is extremely rare, so I am skeptical that it's a huge amount of work to keep up with changes in popular usage. People made maps before they had automated pipelines for ingesting geographical names.
[0] - https://boingboing.net/2019/10/10/do-webrings-next.html
(saw it on the internet, had to share)