The impression I’ve always gotten is that it’s a combination company town (in the old, bad sense) and a testbed for massive surveillance. I think all of the rest is fluid to the point of insensibility.
"Company town" in the old, bad sense doesn't make sense. That's the sense in which the company owns all the land, the only stores are the companies, etc.
It's hard to get good numbers for a cities values, but City of Toronto property taxes are a 4.3 billion dollar line item in the budget and are probably less than 2% assessed value on average (it varies from 0.6 to 2.4 depending on building type). That's a pretty easy lower bound on the real estate in the city being worth 200 billion. Even Google can't afford that.
I’m not sure why you’re taking a discussion about a 4.9 acre “smart city” and conflating it with purchasing all of Toronto. The “company town” nature of the place doesn’t require it to be all of Toronto after all, if that’s where you live and work.
It does when the defining properties of a company town include not being able to easily go elsewhere, and it's trivial to walk/bike/drive/take public transit from the 4.9 acres currently under consideration to the rest of Toronto.
I thought the bad parts of company towns only work when the town is isolated and your paid in google points. If you can just drive 10 minutes to a non-company town store and paid in cash, where is the lock in?
The combination of your home and job, coupled with the surveillance and likely TOS aspects. It’s not a perfect analogy, but in some ways it’s even worse.
Proximity, convenience, habit and time generally incentivizes people to behave in certain ways. I have a supermarket that I go to only because it's 50m away from where I live. Its selection is marginally worse and if there were a better one right next to it, I'd go to that instead, but there isn't. The next one is just enough distance/time away from my regular route to work that I don't feel it's worth the effort unless there's something really specific that I need. This is the kind of calculus that everybody uses to decide where to buy groceries. In a Google "town" with conveniently placed Google markets with a sufficient selection to cover most or all demographics and even a marginally higher cost would manage to capture the vast majority of residents.
That isn't the economic trap of living in a company town, that is like living in the more expensive area of town. So the company town effect doesn't happen. They can only raise their prices too much before the cost of goods outweighs the cost of inconvenience.
I really doubt that any sort of real 'company town' effect will happen.
