> This isn't really on Google

Yes, because it’s so agonizingly difficult to `s/Lake America/Lake Ontario/g` in a data feed. Truly the engineering feat of our time.

It's difficult when you want to pander to the oligarch in the White House so that you can continue to get government contracts.

Blame the person at Google who chose to source from GNIS, without edits.

So you prefer google to be the arbiter of what are official names within each country?

I think the US administration name change is childish, dumb and short-sighted, but if the authority of geographical names in an area designates it as such then I think it should show as such within maps within that area, at least as long as the clarification is readily shown. The same already happens for things like "Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)" or "Myanmar (Burma)".

I guess the question comes down to: do you want google to show the map that your current locality decides to be their interpretation or do you want google to be the arbiter of what a global real map is? Or is there a third alternative that I'm not aware of? (BTW the UN is not a solution to arbiter every countries and languages terms for every country/area/city/lake/ocean/etc.)

> So you prefer google to be the arbiter of what are official names within each country?

No, but they are certainly the arbiter of what names they use on the maps they produce.

So you want them to take a political stance on every naming and territorial dispute?

I wasn't asserting that, I was only pointing out that they can call any feature anything they like on their own maps.

But no, I don't want them to take a political stance on every naming dispute. In this case, however, when the "dispute" is between a clearly incompetent president and the nation he presides over, yes, seeing companies standing up against the madness would be welcome.

That is taking a political stance, which also means that everytime that they accept a change will also be implicitly a political stance.

It was a very reasonable decision when it was made around 2008.

Do you really expect a US based company to go to legal war with the US government over something like this? Because there would 100% be repercussions it they did.

Is there a legal requirement that non-governmental entities source their mapping data from official U.S. government sources?

I don't think that matters with the current administration.

I think that's part of what is frustrating to so many people? Google isn't a small business, and has the legal resources to at least fight back if they were challenged by the administration. Any such challenge would likely fall apart in trial, but even if it didn't Google would have at least challenged the absurdity of it.

The person responsible for the GNIS corruption and the leadership of Google are in essence conjoined twins. The tech oligarchs are not going to make decisions based on interests that aren’t aligned directly with their personal enrichment; and the GNIS Corrupter-in-Chief wields such personal interests rather effectively.

My statement was by no means limited to GNIS updates, that is just a small downstream consequence of a much deeper dysfunction.