You need to speak out against Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America" — and against the corporate cowardice enabling it. This isn't a minor cartographic dispute. It's a test of whether private companies will rubber-stamp authoritarian vanity projects, and right now Google is failing that test spectacularly.
Google didn't even wait for the federal government to update its official maps. They jumped ahead of the USGS, which still shows Lake Ontario as the internationally recognized name, to rename it in their platform first. Their excuse — that they simply follow government data sources — is demonstrably false. Executive orders are not laws. Private corporations have no legal obligation to comply with them. Google chose this.
The reason they chose it matters: Big Tech has spent at least $653 million cozying up to Trump and Republicans, according to Public Citizen, while pushing for data center approvals that communities across the country — Republican and Democrat alike — overwhelmingly oppose. This is a straight transaction. Google gets regulatory favors; Trump gets a map that strokes his ego. The people living next to noisy, polluting, property-value-destroying data centers get nothing. Please use your platform to call this out and push back on both the executive order and the corporate capitulation making it stick.
First sent on September 1 by Jeffrey Barlow
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