Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #BlockSidewalk
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This morning, Waterfront Toronto is hosting what feels like its 100,000th consultation on the Sidewalk Labs proposal for the Quayside site in Toronto, so this is as good a morning as any to trash this totally fictional thread.
/2 Start with "Google." This is a Sidewalk Labs, which may be a company in the same corporate family as Google, but it's different people with a different mandate. Most of Sidewalk's leadership is ex-public service in city/state or provincial govt in New York, NYC or Canada.
/3 This distinction matters to me for the same reason why it matters to Sidewalk's critics to say "Google" every chance they get. Opponents say "Google" b/c they want this to sound like it's basically a giant data collection project. In fact, most of the people working on it -
So I want to talk about google/alphabet and “amateur hour” tactics. It’s a piece of the #BlockSidewalk discussion I may have unique perspective on.
Because they’ve run this play on me before.
Because they’ve run this play on me before.
I spent 8 years at Mozilla working on Firefox and for almost all of that time google was our biggest partner. Our revenue share deal on search drove 90% of Mozilla’s income.
When I started at Mozilla in 2007 there was no Google Chrome and most folks we spoke with inside were Firefox fans. They were building an empire on the web, we were building the web itself.
