Boston billionaire Frank McCourt thinks the Internet is broken. He even goes so far as to say that the way we use the Internet today is robbing us of “our humanity” and “our personhood.”
The real estate developer and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers wants a new internet. And he’s willing to put up $500 million of his own money to build one.
In 2021, McCourt launched the nonprofit organization Project Liberty. The organization is building new technology and is making a bid for the takeover of the social media platform TikTok. In April, Congress passed legislation requiring the app’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance to sell TikTok to a U.S. subsidiary or face a U.S. ban. The legislation is currently facing legal challenges.
Frank McCourt joined WBUR Radio Boston to talk about his mission, his roots in Boston and his recent book “Our Biggest Fight.”
Interview highlights:
Frank McCourt would like to discuss the current internet problems
“What I’m trying to do is get people to see their data as an abstract concept, something that in this digital age is seen as their personality. When the Internet started, it was invented by people who thought it would be democratizing, that it would be a technology that would connect us all… But what has happened in the last twenty years is that the Internet has been colonized. .
“There are essentially five companies that have now co-opted it and the model they are using, driven by the advertising and technology economy, has completely shifted the internet from an open, decentralized, democratizing internet to an autocratic, centralized, surveillance-based one.” based internet. …who now controls us.
“So these platforms have so much information about us. It’s not just about where we shop or what we like to buy or where we like to eat. They actually have information that knows and judges how we think, how we express emotions, how we will respond, how we will behave. They have judged our personality and now we are being manipulated by the internet technology we have.
About why McCourt wants to develop a ‘new internet’
“I have seven children, so anyone who has children can see and, you know, what’s happening to young people. …I mean, you may have the most powerful technology the world has ever known. …It was never built or designed to do what it is used for now.
“You need to design security and trust in systems and infrastructure before you build it, not after you connect billions of people. … We moved fast and now we’re breaking things. And we can do better. We have to do better. And so it can’t be overstated… We can fix this and the most important thing we need to do is re-empower people and give back control and ownership of the data.”
About Project Liberty and McCourt’s plans to make changes to the Internet
“It’s happening now and to take a step back, the Internet was made possible by a very simple core layer protocol, which connected devices together. And then there was a very simple protocol that connected data and created the World Wide Web.
“We still need a simple core layer protocol that connects and empowers us all. That’s why I greenlit the Project Liberty technical trail in December 2019, and some brilliant technologists have been hard at work on the protocol for four and a half years now. create. it is open source, which has been released to the world.
“And starting last year, the first users started migrating to this new protocol, and we now have almost a million people on this alternative internet. The reason I made a bid for TikTok is to now actually catalyze and accelerate the creation of this alternative internet by migrating 170 million TikTok users to it.”
On McCourt’s bid to buy TikTok
“Well, the bid is on behalf of Project Liberty, and it is a bid of the people. And what I mean by that is I want the users, you know, the people who are currently creating TikTok, because they’re the ones generating the content and the data, to be part of the ownership group. I want citizens to be part of the ownership group. …This decision by Congress to force ByteDance to shut down or sell TikTok, is an opportunity to truly migrate the user base to an alternate version of the Internet where all 170 million users have control over their data.”
More about Project Freedom
“Project Liberty is actually focused on three things: one is a trail to bring together people and institutions with like-minded people who want to solve this problem. Another track is to create a movement to socialize this and actually bring together people who are concerned about this. … Here, for example, the parents who joined our bid on TikTok appear because they want to catalyze a movement, a social movement.
“And then there’s the technical track, where DSNP (Decentralized Social Networking Protocol), this thin layered protocol, was created and donated to. It’s an open source protocol.”
On how his efforts differ from “passing the baton” of corporate internet control to billionaires
“I don’t want to own TikTok. I don’t want to be the CEO of a social media platform and I don’t want to be in control of everyone’s data. … This is about an alternative … that empowers people, gives them a voice.
“This is a very different view of what this project is than an individual owning a platform.”
