How Toronto Reined In Big Tech

This week Toronto won a major fight against Big Tech. But unlike the battles underway in Washington, it wasn’t over digital domains like online privacy or ad sales; rather, it was over something deep out of the city’s industrial past: its waterfront.

Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, had proposed rebuilding a chunk of land east of downtown in exchange for using Toronto as a beta test. In pushing back against that plan, Toronto reached a compromise that lets Sidewalk go ahead, but firmly under public control — setting a precedent for how governments around the world can harness the potential for “smart cities” without letting Big Tech dictate the terms.