Lake Ontario ("Lake America")
The quotes add a certain.. je ne sais quoi.
I think overall it's not Google's job to decide the names of things. Half of America voted for the circus, enjoy!
And the correct name in all contexts that matter is "Lake Ontario".
It's almost as if people don't know that "Ontario" is not a Canadian name, it's a native American one, and the province is named after the lake, not the other way around.
It was called "Lake Ontario" before Canada or the US even existed.
Edit: It seems others have figured this out before I did.
Blame the person causing the GNIS updates.
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.
Google Maps users, please report this aberration.
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https://osmfoundation.org/w/images/d/d8/DisputedTerritoriesI...
I say that there are two lakes. It remains for future generations to decide how the two lakes are apportioned. Perhaps each of them are coterminous, with the same boundaries, size and volume, but one is named "Lake America" and one is not. One is a lake in US waters, and the other is in some foreign country.
Perhaps of the two lakes, they are split in twain, and there is an international border running through the middle of these two distinct bodies of water. Perhaps vessels will littorally obtain right of passage in international waters, and undergo customs inspections before they can cross over the somewhat amorphous border between Lake Ontario and Lake America, and vice versa.
2) You really had to choose that country? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Germany
If Trump tells Google, and spends taxpayer money, to "officially rename" Ottawa itself "Poopietown", then should they do it?
Maybe we need a constitutional amendment to remove the president's power over place names, given that the founding fathers only considered a malevolent president, not one with the brain of a 5 year old.
I remember years ago driving across the border at Niagara Falls, and just being waved though, no passport required, when I said I was just on a day trip.
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.)
No, but they are certainly the arbiter of what names they use on the maps they produce.
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.
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.