Sidewalk Labs’ proposal for Waterfront Toronto is a brazen grab for Torontonians’ land and local democracy. Unfortunately, it is an all too familiar story for those of us in other cities where Alphabet, Sidewalk’s parent company, is expanding.

For the past two decades, my organization, the Partnership for Working Families, has worked to build vibrant, inclusive, equitable cities in the U.S. Increasingly that means confronting the outsized power of big tech. Again and again, we have seen Google and its affiliates go to great lengths to subvert democratic practices in our cities. Sidewalk’s overreach in Toronto is no anomaly; it’s how Alphabet does business.

Case in point: for the last two years, communities in San José, Calif., have been fighting for transparency and a seat at the table as Google plans a 50-acre mega campus in the middle of downtown. Instead of engaging the community, Google demanded 18 elected officials and city staff sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), including the mayor and multiple council members.

These agreements kept important details from the public as the tech giant negotiated a secret deal to buy some of San José’s most valuable public land for its private campus. When community members protested at the council meeting to sell the land, police removed all members of the public from chambers and the mayor announced that the vote would proceed without us. Google’s representatives were allowed to stay.

This disregard for transparency and democracy is part of a pattern. Earlier this year, our research uncovered that as Google has built offices and data centres across the U.S., it routinely went out of its way to hide information from the public. As reported in The Washington Post, the corporation’s “development spree has often been shrouded in secrecy, making it nearly impossible for some communities to know, let alone protest or debate, who is using their land, their resources and their tax dollars until after the fact.”

We found that Google has a regular practice of asking public officials to sign extremely broad NDAs, hiding its identity from both public officials and residents through the use of front companies (including during negotiations of economic benefits and public services), and even blocking residents from knowing how much public water its data centres use, claiming is a trade secret.

Alphabet’s endgame is profit, and control is a recurring strategy across its business. Google siphons up our data, decides what search results we see, and dominates online search advertising. Last month, it was reported that the U.S. Congress and Department of Justice are looking into whether the corporation and other tech giants are violating antitrust law.

So we were shocked, but not surprised, to learn that when Sidewalk was invited to propose ideas for developing 12 acres of waterfront property, it instead unleashed a proposal to develop a nearly 200 acre “IDEA district” and named itself as a lead developer for 37 acres of that and a significant development role in all of it.

Worse, Sidewalk’s proposal rejects democratic government by prescribing new and different oversight and governance for the waterfront, as one observer put it, “pushing back the city’s authority and replacing it with semiprivatized bureaucratic SWAT teams.”

But we’ve also seen in other cities that when working people stand together, we can protect democracy from corporate capture. In New York City, communities fought back and won when Amazon sought $3 billion of public money for a second headquarters that would steamroll the most racially diverse urban area in the world. New Yorkers were clear: they would not allow a tech behemoth to rewrite the rules of living and working in Queens to suit only the rich.

In San José, residents, tech service workers, and even Google employees are organizing to hold Google to account and make sure families have the freedom to stay and thrive in the communities they’ve built. Likewise, community groups raising questions about the Sidewalk project, including the #BlockSidewalk campaign, are defending democracy.

For the rest of us, our endgame is vibrant, multiracial democracy and shared prosperity. It’s not just morally right, it is what we need to face the global challenges of authoritarianism, inequality and climate disaster. We believe when Torontonians challenge Sidewalk’s bid for control, they open the door to a truly inclusive and collaborative process to determine the future of their waterfront, their city and our world.

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Lauren Jacobs is executive director of the Partnership for Working Families , a national network of 20 affiliated organizations driving a progressive agenda to harness the power of cities for racial, economic and climate justice and leveraging that influence at the state and national levels.

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