Professor, I'd like to bring you into this discussion about what they're planning in downtown Toronto.
My grandfathers were miners and they didn't have much education, but they swore that they would never live in a company house. They would never shop at a company store. The mining communities fought like hell to have independence from the company, yet we're being told that it's going to be amazing to build a company-run city and that it will be all in our favour.
Some of the stuff that Google, or Alphabet, is offering is that it's going to have innovative transportation like Uber, Lyft and self-driving cars, as well as cloud-enabled smart sensors. Alphabet has an interest already in self-driving cars through its Waymo subsidiary. It has a financial stake in both Uber and Lyft through two VC funds. It has unit building sensors like Nest. It has its own cloud platform.
Are we basically saying to Google, to Alphabet, “Come in. Set up all your products that will benefit you, and our citizens will like it or lump it. If they're going to live there, they're going to live in the Google company town”? What does that mean from a social perspective and an economic perspective, and does there need to be a serious antitrust provision put in if we're going to deal with these kinds of projects?