Mapquest, the original online navigator of the late 90s and early 2000s, is experiencing a resurgence thanks to its stance on President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
“We’re not changing it,” Mapquest said Thursday in posts across their social media pages.
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The company also unveiled a tool that allows users to create their own custom name for the lake, and then download the Mapquest app featuring that name. The company took a similar stance after Trump’s push to rename the Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of Americawhen he returned to office last year.
Many online applauded Mapquest’s stance and its app shot up the charts on the Apple App store over the weekend, coming in first for navigation tools and fourth overall as of Monday morning. The company said “hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded the MapQuest apps since Thursday” and usage is up 50 times its normal rate.
“We took the same approach we did with the Gulf of Mexico: be part of the conversation, and give people an app that keeps the names they’re familiar with,” said Doug Berger, general manager of MapQuest.
For some, learning that the “OG of online mapping” was still around was more surprising than its stance on the lake name change. For those old enough to remember, the 30-year-old company was once the only online navigation tool. It offered directions between two points and required users to print them out or write them down. In 1999, Mapquest was sold to AOL for $1.1 billion and later acquired by Verizon in 2015. Mapquest eventually lost prevalence thanks to the ubiquitous smartphone and GPS navigators like Google Maps and Apple Maps. Verizon sold off Mapquest to the California-based ad-tech firm System1 in 2019.
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But with Google Maps facing backlash for changing the nameof the Lake Ontario to Lake America in its application for U.S. users, Mapquest appears to be benefitting from the fallout. Their original post on X rebuffing the name change had over 103,000 likes and millions of views. None of the account’s more than 20 previous posts this month received more than a handful of likes.
The Google Maps update came two days after Trump’s order amid an escalating trade war with Canada that has led both countries to impose billions of dollars in added tariffs on each other’s goods.
Canada Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced Canada will impose counter-tariffs of 15% to 50% on more than $20 billion in U.S. goods, effective Sept. 8.
Google said in a blog post Saturday that the decision was based on its practice of using names assigned by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, also known as GNIS.
Trump’s decision Thursday to rename the lake was met with mockery and indifference in both Canada and the United States. On Saturday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford responded to Trump’s order with a billboard-sized message on the Canadian shore: “Lake Ontario. Now and forever.”
Apple Maps also appears to continue using Lake Ontario as of midday on Monday. Last year, however, Apple Maps changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico after Trump signed an order renaming it Gulf of America.
NBC Local has reached out to Apple for comment but the company did not immediately respond.
