I woke up early on Monday morning for 14 interviews focused on digital sovereignty on CBC Radio stations across the country (here’s the Manitoba version). Most opened the discussion by asking what digital sovereignty means. My answer was that it is about choice: the ability of Canadians to choose the digital services they use and the ability to ensure that Canadian law applies to those services here. Several hosts then cited the emerging Google Maps controversy, in which U.S. users now see “Lake America” while Canadians continue to see “Lake Ontario”. The reference made sense in the moment, but on reflection, I don’t think the mapping case is an example of digital sovereignty gone wrong. This may not be a popular opinion, but the incident demonstrates the opposite since Canadian rules are being respected domestically and large Internet platforms are refraining from using their power to decide which rules to follow.

President Trump signed an executive order last week purporting to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. This is absurd, but given the order, the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, the federal government’s official geographic names database, updated its entry. In a move Vass Bednar called “digital imperialism”, Google applied what it described as its long-standing policy for bodies of water whose names vary from country to country, the same policy it applied to the Gulf of Mexico last year. As a result, users in the U.S. see Lake America, users in Canada see Lake Ontario, and users everywhere else see Lake Ontario with Lake America in parentheses. Apple followed on Tuesday with the identical three-tier approach for Apple Maps, after the U.S. Interior Secretary confirmed that Trump had pressed the company directly.

But is this really a loss of digital sovereignty? Despite Trump’s order, when Canadians use Google or Apple Maps, they see Lake Ontario because the platforms follow Canada’s official designation for Canadian users, just as they follow GNIS for U.S. users. Digital imperialism would result in U.S. designations displayed to Canadians against Canadian authority. As I argued last week in the context of the collapsed trade talks, the sovereignty principle that enjoys the deepest public support is that Canada decides what happens within its borders, which is what happened on the mapping services.

While critics may respond that Google was under no legal obligation to make any change since the executive order changed the official U.S. designation rather than imposing duties on private companies, the real digital sovereignty risk comes from Internet giants that disregard national laws and official designations and decide for themselves which to follow. Google could have ignored the U.S. designation, just as it could ignore a Canadian designation or law. But the better approach is to ensure that national laws and policies are respected and the services are tailored to national legal frameworks. In other words, when offering a service to Canadians, abide by Canadian law. But just as U.S. designations should stop at its border, so too should Canadian designations at ours.

Several prominent Canadian sites displayed Lake America to Canadians over the weekend, including Hydro One’s outage map, the LCBO store locator, GO Transit’s station finder, and a federal housing and infrastructure map. This occurred because those services embed the Google Maps API and had not set the region parameter to Canada, a setting that Google’s own documentation encourages developers to apply. This was easily fixable, with Hydro One and the LCBO quickly correcting their maps, and speaks not to a choice by Google but rather to the choices made by those sites themselves. If digital sovereignty is about choice, then choice has to be exercised. Just as businesses and organizations are choosing to host their data in Canada or use Canadian-based services (consider my recent Law Bytes podcast on Gander Social), sites must proactively ensure that the defaults on their services are set to Canada.

The digital sovereignty fights that count involve U.S. demands for control over data in trade talks, the policies that are part of so-called digital trade alignment, and access to frontier AI. The Lake Ontario mapping episode is not illustrative of a loss of digital sovereignty. Indeed, Canada’s designation prevailed on Canadian screens without regulatory intervention precisely because the platforms recognized Canadian authority. Encouraging the platforms to defy official U.S. designations is a classic case of being careful what you wish for, inviting companies to pick and choose which national rules to respect, and ultimately having Canadians bemoan the loss of digital sovereignty when the platforms pick someone else’s rules over ours.