Billionaire Frank McCourt Shares His Vision for a Decentralized, User-Owned TikTok (2024)

TORONTO–Billionaire and former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt brought a bundle of contradictions to the stage of the Collision conference this week: He thinks social media has become fundamentally unhealthy, but wants to buy one of the web's biggest social networks—without keeping what most people consider its most valuable asset.

In an onstage interview Tuesday, McCourt pitched his Project Liberty plan to rebuild the web on a “digital self-determination” framework and how what he’s calling his “People’s Bid” for TikTok would make that happen.

"How do we scale it?” he hypothetically asked Associated Press executive editor Julie Pace.

McCourt’s impetus for both Project Liberty and this bid to buy TikTok (before a ban on business transactions cuts it off from commercial life in the U.S.) is that social media as we know it is fundamentally harmful, especially to kids.

“This is an epidemic, and our responsibility as adults here is to protect the next generation,” he said. “I am really really concerned, I mean borderline petrified about what my younger kids are entering into right now.”

McCourt, who made a large fraction of his fortune (which Forbes now estimates at $1.4 billion) from a sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers forced by Major League Baseball, also sees privacy and control risks for grownups on social media.

“We're losing our citizenship. We're losing our rights,” he said. “And the kings are not in robes and crowns; they just run these big platforms.”

And while McCourt answered Pace’s opening question about whether he agreed with U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s plea in the New York Times for a government-mandated warning label on social media with one word—“Yes”—he expressed no confidence in government oversight of these platforms.

“The policy-making, regulatory environment cannot possibly keep up with the speed and the power of technology,” McCourt told Pace.

The idea behind Project LIberty (which McCourt glossed over in his 25-minute appearance) is conceptually not far from such decentralized social-media architectures as ActivityPub, the federated protocol Mastodon uses, and Bluesky’s ATProto.

But Project Liberty’s DSNP (Decentralized Social Networking Protocol) would both give people direct control over their core identities and decentralize online interactions by writing them to a blockchain.

“I think it's time that we reclaim our data,” McCourt said, asking later: “Would you like an Internet where you own you?”

DSNP’s blockchain basis could make it an energy hog, but the biggest obstacle for this project so far has been the paucity of people using it.

Only one platform—the already-privacy-optimized would-be Facebook alternative MeWe—has adopted DSNP, having signed onto Project Liberty in 2022. The TikTok bid that McCourt announced in May, with support from web inventor and data sovereignty advocate Tim Berners-Lee, could address that scale problem in one giant transaction.

“170 million people can move over to this alternative, which, by the way, is already up and running,” McCourt said. “It needs this scale to be viable.”

Interestingly, this bid to purchase TikTok intentionally excludes the platform's powerful but enigmatic recommendation algorithm, which he said should help his proposal meet ByteDance’s approval.

“We don't want it and we don't need it, which is why our People’s Bid has a great chance of succeeding,” he said. “We don't think replacing China's control and money with some other sovereign's control and money solves anything.”

ByteDance, however, has focused on fighting off this forced divestment in court and has suggested that it would rather shut down TikTok than comply with the law President Biden signed in April, which would force app store operators to remove TikTok as early as January 2025.

McCourt isn't the only person vying for ownership of TikTok, though. Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick have each reportedly floated bids to purchase the company.

And the half a billion dollars McCourt said onstage that he’s committed to Project Liberty is nowhere enough to cover the tab for a TikTok acquisition that could easily go into tens of billions of dollars.

McCourt said he would be announcing additional bidders joining his group “every week,” but also suggested that TikTok owners might also want to join.

“Let the 170 million people own a share of the platform,” he said before citing a model of collective sports franchise ownership divorced from his Dodgers experience: “Let's Green Bay Packer TikTok.”