Sidewalk Labs leaves as peak Google comes into view

Every empire has its peak. The announcement Thursday that Google’s Sidewalk Labs is abandoning its $900 million efforts to turn Toronto’s waterfront into a “city of the future” may be a bright line marking the turn of Google’s own future.

You can only push people so far until they start paying attention. For some it was when the proposal for the initial 12 acre “Quayside” area called for “ubiquitous connectivity networks” and creating a new category of data called “urban data.”

For some, it was when leaked documents showed the plan was actually for a 350-acre area (about 30 times the original) with their own tax revenue.

For some, it was when founder of BlackBerry Jim Balsillie called the project a “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues.”

For many, it was in October 2018, when Canada’s former privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian resigned from the advisory board over, you guessed it, concerns with privacy.

However, terms like “vulnerabilities” or “security risks” were at the centre of much of this backlash, as if there were some cartoon villains waiting on a yacht in international waters to heist away your “urban data” and steal your identity.

This misses the entire point. The business models of every technology and development partner within the Sidewalk Labs consortium is based around collecting, aggregating and monetizing the data that is generated by the Quayside development. How do I know that? Because that is the business model of EVERY technology and development company, either directly or indirectly.

Identifiable data is objectively more valuable than non-identifiable data so Google can command higher premiums from partners. This isn’t a technological security risk, it’s a business model; one that balances the cost of public backlash against the value that can be generated from ever more invasive data policies and finds the happy tipping point.

Google has become one of the most valuable companies on Earth by understanding the exact location of that tipping.

However, Google’s expertise has always stemmed from the digital realm. It has long been its goal to merge the virtual and physical and push further and further into the physical world; starting with Google maps and now with full on real estate developments like Quayside to merge this ecosystem together.

However, with the physical world it becomes increasingly expensive to put data collecting infrastructure in place and most importantly, it becomes harder to do it quietly.

With the cancellation of the Quayside project we now have objective proof that that tipping point is finally moving backwards. The empire may have reached its highwater mark.