Honestly, it’s been hard to draw attention to the proposed PayIt deal. It’s also hard to describe it because of how it’s being marketed and sold vs. all the complexity it represents. It’s about more than payments to be sure.
For these reasons, we’re trying to connect it to something more of us in Toronto are familiar with, which is Presto (not implying that they’re the same or have the same business models) because there are useful lessons we should have learned from Presto that we don’t appear to have solved yet. Even though the business model shifts - PayIt is being positioned as free software while Presto had large cost overruns - we all know the sayings about free things. And we need to be able to cut through the sales language and move into impacts.
Thinking about Presto and PayIt together allows us to see what they have in common - big public tech deals with far-reaching consequences - as well as how they’re different, which in some cases are pretty extreme. For example, we expect a good number of people would adopt and happily use PayIt, and enjoy the experience vs. a bad experience with Presto, but in both cases, the company is being given an immense amount of power as an intermediary between residents and our government, and that power is what we need to keep a well-trained eye on.
Below is a table we’ve created to show a few ways to consider PayIt in relation to Presto. It’s not perfect, and we’re open to conversations about all of them, as ever. We hope that by showing the common themes and impacts of long-term public technology choices, you might get involved in stopping this deal so that we can reset the process to one that includes many, many other ways to go about it.
