Apple, Google Pathetically Buckle To Trump’s Dim And Lazy Effort To Rename Lake Ontario

from the ‘pathetic,-that’s-what-it-is’ dept

When we look back at this time and history words like “courage,” “integrity,” and “ethics” aren’t words you’re going to be associating with U.S. tech industry leadership. Everywhere you look you have tech sector executives either openly embracing fascism and the frontal assault on representative democracy, or too feckless and timid to take any sort of coherent stand on literally anything (and then wondering why the plebs are increasingly hostile to their software products).

Apple and Google’s quick decision to rename the Gulf Of Mexico at the behest of a mad and racist king was a lovely example; and now we’re back again with both companies quickly moving to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” just because the increasingly unpopular U.S. President had a brain fart during his pointless and harmful trade war with Canada.

Google was the first to quickly make the change to appease Trump; in fact they acted so quickly on this the change to Google Maps happened before the government had even finished implementing it. Apple was very quick to follow suit, despite the fact that nobody at the company actually supports the ridiculous and pointless change:

These are, so we are clear, active choices — their mapping systems aren’t just innately and automatically following the lead of the authoritarian U.S. government’s GNIS data. Google (and the company’s defenders) had initially tried to insist they were following automated GNIS protocols, but that wasn’t actually the case:

“Google began rolling out this change for US users on Saturday. The company posted a brief update on its Google Maps blog, noting that it follows the US Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) for its maps, so the company implies it had no choice but to rename Lake Ontario in Google Maps, which is the most popular mapping platform in the US by a wide margin.

However, Google was even quicker to switch over to Lake America than the US government. While the GNIS database acknowledges the name change in a summary report, the base map layer still reflects the internationally recognized name of Lake Ontario. A message across the top of the USGS-operated website notes that the change to official maps is still pending.”

Even then, there’s nothing saying Google couldn’t have ignored the GNIS changes for the sake of product quality. As it is, both Apple and Google are still ensuring that U.S. users of both mapping products see King Trump’s pointless change, while everybody else in the world sees material reality.

This lightning-fast choice to quickly buckle to the incoherent whims of a tyrant over something this stupid certainly raises questions about what kinds of subservience we don’t know about yet by these titans of U.S. innovation. There was some hope that Apple, with new CEO leadership and no shortage of “fuck you money,” would demonstrate some sort of ethical leadership here, but alas.

Amusingly Mapquest (and I guess TomTom) used Apple and Google’s abject fecklessness to market “having the slightest hint of a backbone” as a market branding differentiator:

“The company said its mobile app received hundreds of thousands of downloads after it announced Thursday that the name Lake Ontario would remain on its apps, despite Trump directing the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).”

This is still somehow occurring despite the fact that Trump’s support is cratering due to pointless wars, high oil prices, sagging polling, and clearly waning health. Even on these peripheral issues where taking a stand could be easily defended by an ocean of highly paid lawyers, executives can’t even muster the vaguest outline of some sort of meaningful backbone.

I’m sure they’d argue that it’s their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to not “antagonize” the U.S. government. But where’s the fiduciary responsibility to the continued existence to functional markets, industry autonomy, and democracy in a country under assault by some of the dimmest, most incompetent and corrupt autocrats the American experiment has ever seen?

Filed Under: apple maps, authoritarians, big tech, cowardice, donald trump, fascism, google maps, lake america, lake ontario

Companies: apple, google, mapquest