Within days of President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” Google Maps quietly fell in line. Searches for the international boundary water in Google Maps now direct U.S. users to a renamed “Lake America.”
While the president’s preferred name for the smallest Great Lake isn’t yet reflected on Apple Maps, it may be just a matter of time — searches for the “Gulf of Mexico” on that app lead to the “Gulf of America,” which Trump renamed on his first day in office.
But there is one holdout against Trump’s efforts to rechristen boundary waters, a voice of dissent straight out of 2005: Mapquest.
“We’re not changing it,” Mapquest posted on Facebook Friday over a screenshot of the lake. It also unveiled a tool that allows users to download maps featuring their own custom names for the lake.
For many, Mapquest’s political stance was less surprising than the news that Mapquest still exists. The company was acquired in 2019 by System1, a Marina del Rey-based advertising platform.
In the years before smartphones and ubiquitous GPS, Mapquest.com was the vanguard of online wayfinding. Launched in 1996, the site would generate printable directions between two points, which users would then either have to jot down or print out before heading out on their journey.
It was the Internet’s leading mapping site when America Online acquired it in December 1999 for $1.1 billion, or roughly $2.2 billion in today’s dollars.
The site lost ground to competitors over the following decade, and its ownership transferred to Verizon after that company’s 2015 purchase of AOL. Four years later, Verizon sold Mapquest to System1 for a sum so reportedly tiny that Verizon did not file any public paperwork to record it, Business Insider reported.
The company’s approach to the second Trump administration’s renaming spree has earned it name recognition among a new generation of users, with “hundreds of thousands” of new downloads since the Lake America announcement, general manager Doug Berger told the Times Sunday.
Cartography enthusiasts have pointed out that Trump does not have authority to rename any of the Great Lakes, which for more than a century have been governed by a joint U.S.-Canada commission. The U.S. president’s naming authority extends only to federal maps and agencies; other nations — and private map providers — are not obligated to adopt the change.
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