Sideways
The City Google Couldn't Buy
From the tech reporter who most closely pursued the Sidewalk Labs fiasco in Toronto, an uncompromising look into what the Google sister company's failure in urban development reveals about Big Tech, data 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 underdeveloped lakeshore was available for development, and with Google co-founder Larry Page and 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…
$25.00
November 12, 2024
JOSH O’KANE has been a reporter with the Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, since 2011. He won Germany’s Arthur F. Burns Award for transatlantic political and cultural reporting in 2019, for his coverage of that country’s broad pushback against Big Tech. O’Kane’s reporting has also won numerous Best in Canada awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. His first book, Nowhere with You, was a Canadian bestseller. He lives in Toronto.
