Google Maps has become a tool of digital imperialism

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Vass Bednar is the managing director of the Canadian Shield Institute and co-author of The Big Fix.

Back in 2005, when the internet was still silly, exploratory and fun, one of the first mainstream viral videos was a three-minute clip from Saturday Night Live called “Lazy Sunday.” The rap song represented a kind of crossover moment between traditional media and whatever this new thing on our screens was becoming.

The video contains another artifact of a lost time, in which comedians Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell debate how to get to Magnolia Bakery: “Well, let’s hit up Yahoo Maps to find the dopest route.” “I prefer MapQuest.” “That’s a good one, too.” “Google Maps is the best.” “True that, double true!”

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Two decades later, Yahoo Maps has been shut down and MapQuest has been sold multiple times. Google Maps, meanwhile, has become much more than just a handy website you can use to find the “dopest” route – it’s now a massive part of the information infrastructure through which we understand the physical world.

This all makes the latest troll in the Canada-U.S. trade war worth taking seriously.

Last week, Donald Trump renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” through an executive order directing U.S. federal agencies and the U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) to use the new name. But Canada and the U.S. each retain jurisdiction over the waters on their respective sides of the boundary. Mr. Trump can decide what the U.S. government calls their half, but he can’t turn our half “American” with the stroke of a pen.

But in 2026, pixels can do that – which is why it’s prompted such outrage that Google Maps now displays it as “Lake America.” Google says it is only following official government naming sources by country. A user in the U.S. would see the entire feature labelled “Lake America,” while a user in Canada would see it labelled “Lake Ontario,” and users elsewhere see both names.

At first glance, this might seem like a clever compromise: different countries get different maps. But Google hasn’t divided the lake in a way that accurately reflects the tension at play. Rather, it has geofenced the whole of the lake – of reality – based on the viewer’s location. As a result, Google’s decision is more consequential than the theatre of the name change. It’s deliberate epistemic collapse.

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The line across the lake has really become a line drawn across the sand – revealing whether companies like Apple (which has yet to make any changes) or MapQuest (which has said it will not) are down to comply with a tyrannical clown. No law requires any private company to follow the GNIS, including Google, which the European Commission hit with a €890-million fine for breaching the Digital Markets Act in July – prompting Mr. Trump to vow to open an investigation and punish the EU. In fact, this whole mess is a good example of what scholars have been warning about for years: that U.S. tech companies are uniquely susceptible to U.S. government pressure.

The Great Lakes region, with a GDP of roughly US$9-trillion, would be the third largest economy in the world, if it were a country. That makes this spat less arbitrary. The fact that American state power can so confidently travel through American digital infrastructure is a much more consequential feature of the Canada-U.S. relationship than Mr. Trump’s petty naming choices.

But before we can pursue a solution, we need to agree on the main problem: Material power is increasingly exercised through digital infrastructure, and Canada has allowed too much of that infrastructure to become synonymous with a handful of American companies. (Indeed, because of how some web developers outsourced their digital layers, online maps on some Canadian government, utility and agency websites have displayed Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”) We’re dealing with a shared project of digital imperialism.

Other models do exist. W Social, a for-profit social-media platform that soft-launched at Davos, offers a privacy-first, made-in-EU alternative to X. (Mark Carney, whose address to the EU in September will be broadcast on W Social, has yet to create a profile on the decentralized Canadian-made platform Gander.) OpenStreetMap offers a global, collaboratively built geographic database that other services can build on, rather than having one company control the underlying structures and the interface. (Canada’s closest equivalent was the Toronto-based offline-mapping app Avenza, which was sold this April to a Boston private equity firm and folded into the Maine-based Blue Marble.)

Alternatives like these will only become more popular as people look for ways to get out of Google’s ecosystem and into something more true – double true.