Sidewalk Labs is Alphabet Inc.'s urban innovation organization. Infrastructure development would be controlled by the agency rather than the company. Quayside „ist keine intelligente Stadt“, schrieb er in einem Zeitungskommentar. “Forget it,” she said. Though it was the iPhone that first dethroned the BlackBerry from the top of the smartphone market, Android — used in a huge number of phones across price points — cemented BlackBerry’s descent into tech’s history bin. Testifying in Ottawa at a hearing about the Cambridge Analytica scandal in May that year, he told members of a parliamentary committee that “Facebook and Google are companies built exclusively on the principle of mass surveillance.” The danger of partnering with foreign companies like Sidewalk Labs was that “our data is subject to foreign laws, making Canada a client state,” he’d said.“The ability to track citizens, to engage in surveillance with the technology that they’re proposing — that’s not going to happen”Balsillie was also taking his grievances to the world stage. Wylie worries the public is accepting these technologies as emergency measures, and without the realization that once such architecture is in place, it may be repurposed down the road for less noble purposes — such as the developing surveillance apparatus in China that critics fear spreading into the world’s weakened democracies. The Quayside announcement inspired a groundswell of resistance, first among civil liberties activists, and then, eventually, among the ranks of Canada’s most prominent businesspeople, local civic leaders, and Toronto residents. A spokeswoman for the prime minister told me that the comment referred to a general intent to collaborate and was not in reference to the Sidewalk Labs project in particular, but doubts lingered.Further raising eyebrows, the press conference took place one day after the Waterfront Toronto board voted to approve their initial agreement with Sidewalk Labs, a complex legal document the board was given just the weekend to review. Canadians are regulators, and our governments are very attuned to their responsibility — they didn’t realize how American they were in their approach.” The company was told, “You’re just going to have to live with it,” Burstyn said. Painted the same blue as the Sidewalk Labs T-shirts, the visitor center showcased some of the flashier technologies proposed for Quayside, such as “building raincoats” that could spring out from a facade to make outdoor space more usable in inclement weather, and street pavers with embedded lights that would heat the pavement and could act as changeable lane markings. Quayside, as the 12-acre waterfront project had been christened, would be “a testbed for new technologies,” he said, “that will help us build smarter, greener, more inclusive cities.” Not one to shy away from wholesome platitudes, he added, “The future, just like this community, will be interconnected.”Then Schmidt rose to the lectern and said that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had long opined about “all of these things that we could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge.” Chuckles reverberated through the crowd.News that Alphabet had leaped neck deep into the smart city business lit up tech media for weeks.

“People don’t even have the language to have a public conversation around data practices, privacy, smart cities.”Scandalous headlines about the Quayside project kept coming. Wylie is now a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a think tank founded by Balsillie.

And with the defeat of Quayside, the activists, academics, and business elite that comprise the tech reform movement, if one could call it that, have a playbook for future battles.A newsletter that puts the week's most compelling tech stories in context, by OneZero senior writer Will Oremus.