"From the reporter who knows the story best, how the fight over a forlorn piece of urban shoreline turned a Canadian city into a battleground of global consequence for the future of democracies and economies. 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 post-industrial lakeshore was available for development. With Google co-founder Larry Page and his trusted chairman, Eric Schmidt, buying into Sidewalk Labs' pitch for the property -- and 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 Waterfront Toronto, the government-backed organization that owned the land. As hundreds more acres of undeveloped former port lands crept into Sidewalk's plans, alarm bells began ringing over how much the public would actually benefit from the Alphabet-owned company's vision for the high-tech neighbourhood -- and what the company might do with the data it could harvest from the people living there. To Torontonians accustomed to big promises with little follow-through, the ensuing fiasco at first seemed like just another city-building sideshow. But the battle to reel in the ambition of Sidewalk Labs became a crucible moment in the worldwide battle for data rights and against the extension of Big Techs digital might into physical world. With extensive contacts on all sides of the debacle, O'Kane tells a story of global importance fought over a small plot of mud and pavement, taking readers from Silicon Valley to New York City to Toronto to Berlin and back again. In the tradition of boardroom dramas like 'Bad Blood' and 'Super Pumped,' 'Sideways' vividly recreates the clashing personalities and David-and-Goliath battle that showed the world that all may not be lost in the effort to contain the rapidly expanding power of Big Tech."--Jacket.