Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy

Josh O'Kane

Language: English

Published: Sep 13, 2022

Description:

From the Globe and Mail tech reporter who revealed countless controversies while following the Sidewalk Labs fiasco in Toronto, an uncompromising investigation into the bigger story and what the Google sister company's failure there reveals about Big Tech, data privacy and the monetization of everything.
When former New York deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff landed in Toronto,  promising a revolution in better living through technology, the locals were starstruck. In 2017 a small parcel of land on the city's woefully underdeveloped lakeshore was available for development, and with Google co-founder Larry Page and his trusted chairman Eric Schmidt leaning into Sidewalk Labs' pitch for the long-forsaken property—with Doctoroff as the urban-planning company's CEO—Sidewalk's bid crushed the competition. 
     But as soon as the bid was won, cracks appeared in the partnership between Doctoroff's team and Waterfront Toronto,...