Can TikTok help Frank McCourt reinvent the internet?

Frank McCourt is better known as a real estate guy than as a tech guy. He built his fortune in land and buildings — concrete and steel — and then bought the Los Angeles Dodgers from News Corp in February 2004. More than two decades later, at 70, he’s back in the spotlight wanting to buy TikTok. Though he doesn’t just want to buy it, he wants to fix it.

To understand why, you have to understand McCourt’s latest obsession: the idea that the internet is broken, and that whoever controls the data controls everything. He’s spent the past few years pouring time and money into Project Liberty, an ambitious attempt to rebuild the digital world so that people — not giant corporations or governments — own their own data. 

To most, that sounds like an abstract philosophical problem. To McCourt, it’s a simple question of “personhood” and property rights. 

The timing couldn’t be better. TikTok is under siege in Washington, accused of being a kind of Trojan horse for Chinese influence. Congress passed a law last year that requires that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sell a majority stake of its American operations or face a ban.

That’s where McCourt sees an opening: an opportunity not just to bring TikTok under American control, but to use it as a test case for a whole new kind of internet—one that he believes could upend the power dynamics of Big Tech.

The Click Here podcast sat down with McCourt to talk about why he thinks his bid is the most sensible for the Chinese company and sees the congressional bid to rein in TikTok as a “gift.”

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

CLICK HERE: You’ve said you think you are the most viable and best buyer for TikTok, why do you say that?

FRANK MCCOURT:  We have a solution. Coincidentally, purely coincidentally, I don't want to imply that, you know, when I launched Project Liberty in December of 2019, I was thinking that TikTok was going to be banned someday. That was not it at all. But we happen to have a solution that solves the riddle, and it would be a wonderful way to catalyze this upgraded Internet, this alternative Internet [by having] access to the user base of TikTok. The network effects will create very explosive growth.

CH: Tell me about this plan to upgrade the Internet.

FM:  [In the beginning] we thought the internet was an inherently good thing. We thought it was inherently democratizing. Somehow it was going to make us all smarter and advance civilization. And that was certainly the intent of the creators of the Internet and certainly Tim Berners-Lee with the World Wide Web.

But what's happened subsequently is It's made us dumber. It has corrupted our information ecosystem. It's very difficult to separate fact from fiction. We're barely governable. We're polarized. Children are being harmed and taken advantage of. So there's a lot broken with the internet. 

CH: When you brought this idea of buying TikTok to fix the internet to the Chinese did they see this as a solution too?  

FM: Unclear, to be honest with you. We know the algorithm is something that the Chinese have declared national property. We've been operating on the basis that if two things happen, we would be the best buyer and maybe the only viable buyer.

The first was the U.S. government had to win its case in the Supreme Court after ByteDance sued [saying the law violated the First Amendment]. They went through the court system and the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 that the national security risks were real and the legislation was valid. So we guessed right on that one. 

The second is we're hoping that China and ByteDance just decide to sell U.S. TikTok without the back end, without the algorithm and the Chinese technology. [If that is the case] we think we're in an excellent position to buy what's left — the user base and the data and the toolkit. And we'd love the brand, obviously.

CH: And is that where you see this going?

FM: It's unclear. The honest answer to your question is we don't know what China is going to do. We don't know if they're going to sell U.S. TikTok or just shut it down. That's the big question right now. And we certainly know they're not selling with the IP.

CH: You talk about modernizing the internet, how does Project Liberty do that?

 FM: I'm going to oversimplify a bit, but 50 years ago a group of really smart computer scientists, in response to a challenge by the U.S. government, created a decentralized telecommunications system and agreed on a protocol – what we know as TCP slash IP. 

So the internet was born because this was an agreed-upon protocol that enabled this connectivity. Roughly 15 years later, Tim Berners-Lee came along with a brilliant idea to create another protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol,  HTTP, which essentially connected data. And with the wide adoption of HTTP, the World Wide Web was born. 

So the idea with Project Liberty is it's beyond time that there'd be another simple core internet protocol that actually connects each of us to the internet – not just our devices. So that's what the S and P is in our DNSP protocol. It enables individuals to interact directly to be in control on the internet. We as individuals would own our identity, our data, our relationships and give permission for its use.

It's totally logical that the internet should evolve this way. If this protocol — DSNP — is adopted at scale, just like the prior two protocols I just described were adopted at scale, the Internet would operate in a fundamentally different way.  

CH: Do I check boxes to opt in or opt out? 

FM: No, you'd be interacting with at the top of the stack, the so called apps and so forth, would also be using the protocol. So you wouldn't be having to opt in or out just like you don't opt in or out of TCP/IP or HTTP, right? It's just how it works.

And now imagine. This new internet where you have a single sign-on. So you are signing on to the internet, not your device. You don't have 50 passwords that you have to remember for 50 different apps because the apps are built using the same protocol. You have access to all of them.

Rather than clicking on the terms and conditions mindlessly, as we do now on a few big applications … giving up  all of our data … on this next version of the internet, the apps would actually be clicking on your terms and conditions of use for access to your data.

So you would parse out use of your data on a permission basis. So it's a next-gen web.

So you're in a bargaining position because nobody would argue in this day and age that our data isn't highly valuable, particularly when aggregated. So why not  put individuals in the driver's seat?  Permission the use of their data and actually get compensated if there's great value created.

So this is really changing the power dynamic from a few big platforms who actually surveil us, scrape our data, aggregate it and then apply algorithms to manipulate us. This is putting the power in the hands of the individuals.

CH: The co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, has joined you in this bid for TikTok. Did you call him or did he call you?

FM: Alexis and I were put together by a mutual friend. Alexis is a very, very accomplished technologist and he’s one of the few actually that bridges the social media world and the new world of where technology is going. He’s very philosophically aligned with this concept that people should own themselves and own their identity and their data and relationships.

So, you know, we had a conversation. It was a great conversation and we were obviously on the same page, so to speak, and then he said to me, "Can I get involved?" And I said, by all means, I mean, this is the people's bid. For this to happen this needs to be an effort by a lot of people who want to see a change. It is really almost like a movement.

I spoke recently to the undersecretary of the U.N., and she said that the U.N. currently cannot fulfill a single one of its global agenda items because of the constant distractions that they have to deal with on a daily basis around mis- and disinformation. Their resources, both human and financial, are diverted to putting out these disinformation fires. It just shouldn't be that way. 

Better technology is not going to eliminate all bad human behavior, right? I understand that. But why in the world should we settle for an internet that amplifies bad behavior? That makes it easy for the bad guys to wreak havoc and make life difficult. Let's amplify the good stuff and let’s get back to what the intention was here: to advance civilization and to empower people.

CH: Vice President JD Vance is supposed to be leading the effort to find a buyer … have you been talking with him?

FM: I'm not going to get into the details of those conversations, but I can confirm that we've been in dialogue with the White House and with Vice President Vance's office and we've provided information that they've requested and those are active conversations. 

CH: Do you get the sense that they're close to some sort of resolution on this? Because that's what I'm hearing.  

FM: Yeah, I think there's a desire to get something done and I think that's good.