In 1996, MapQuest put maps online before Google Maps; now it rejects ‘Lake America’

US President Donald Trump's attempt to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America" has run into resistance from an unlikely source: MapQuest. The online mapping service predates Google Maps by nearly a decade. MapQuest's X account recently shared a screenshot of the body of water, saying: "We're not changing the name of Lake Ontario. Name it whatever you want at your leisure." The post received over 70,000 likes. Meanwhile, none of the account's 24 posts in July got more than two. The company also built a tool letting users generate their own joke screenshots with alternate labels for the lake, including one reading "Lake Are We Doing This Again?"In 1996, MapQuest became the first major consumer-facing commercial mapping platform before Google Maps. AOL bought it for $1.1 billion four years later, at the height of the dot-com boom. However, by 2008, MapQuest fell behind Google Maps.