Does the TikTok ban represent an opportunity to rethink the entire internet?

McCourt, who says he has no interest in becoming TikTok’s CEO, is unique among the pool of potential buyers. To begin with, he has remained steadfastly public, expressing his interest in purchasing the app in print and television interviews, including on “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite show. It is also the only potential buyer so far who has promised to serve the public interest, addressing not only geopolitical concerns about the app but also the harmful effects it has been shown to have on young users. But there are skeptics about the viability of the “popular show.” “The obstacles to Project Liberty acquiring TikTok are enormous,” according to Adam Kovacevich, a Democratic tech lobbyist. Even if China allows the sale to proceed, Project Liberty will compete with a list of potential buyers that could include companies such as Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and MaskX. “For their original mission of healthy social media,” Kovacevic said of the Freedom Project. But he added, “The non-profit will be outbid.”

In November, just a few weeks after Trump’s victory, the Freedom Project launched the “Future of the Internet Summit” at the McCourt School of Public Policy, which McCourt endowed to Georgetown University, his alma mater. The event was an example of billionaire McCourt’s power, bringing together those with common interests who don’t often meet face-to-face: four hundred attendees including politicians like Amy Klobuchar, Ro Khanna, and Nancy Mace; Technologists like Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin; TikTok creators; vector thinking; And grieving parents. Brandon Guffey, the Republican representative in the South Carolina state legislature whose teenage son killed himself after falling prey to an Instagram sextortion scheme, was sitting a few feet away from me during the opening statement. McCourt walked around the stage wearing a dark jacket and jeans, a small headset pressed to his ear. “You’ll hear the word ‘data’ mentioned over and over again,” he said. “Every time you hear it, I ask you to think ‘personality’. Your data is you in the digital age. Wouldn’t you want it to own you?”

More broadly, Project Liberty is part of the movement toward a decentralized social internet, where no single network controls users’ data and users can instead move their online identities and communities from one network to another without having to start from scratch. The idea is to create “interoperability,” which would, in theory, give users greater power; If they don’t like the style or content moderation on one site, they can move to another site relatively easily, without losing followers. The term “fediverse” is often applied to a group of sites, including Mastodon and Meta’s Threads, that use decentralized and interoperable systems. Bluesky, while not technically in the federal domain — it doesn’t use the ActivityPub protocol that federal sites use — is a spiritual cousin and can easily be connected to fedverses through services like Bridgy Fed. Project Liberty proposes that its own contribution to the decentralized internet, the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol, or DSNP, could be used in ride-sharing apps and on social media to enable creators to “manage their identity” and “avoid deplatforming.”

So far, MeWe is the only social networking site to fully embrace Project Liberty’s DSNP system, migrating about 1.5 million users to it; Bluesky currently has over twenty-seven million users. “DSNP has a reputation as a steampunk program,” one technologist, who wanted to remain anonymous because they received funding from Project Liberty, told me. The main reason McCourt wanted to buy TikTok was to acquire its user base and move its members and their data to the decentralized Project Liberty protocol; He insists that he does not need the application algorithm. “I have no interest in maintaining a version of TikTok that just duplicates the algorithm and mines people’s data,” McCourt told me. His version of the app would help “create an alternative Internet, and then others will have to move in that direction, because that’s what the market wants.”

But details about what a project-owned version of TikTok might look like are minimal. “The move to this new infrastructure will be designed to minimize disruption for TikTokers,” promised a recent press release from the group, though the app experience will undoubtedly change without its algorithm. This, to some in the industry, seems like a reactionary approach to fixing social media problems. “McCourt seems to be saying, ‘Let’s use my money to acquire users,'” the tech said. “We’re just going to build the product, we’re going to build the Twitter alternative, and when people need to leave, they’re going to come here,” Plosky said. (When I asked McCourt about that kind of criticism, he said, “First of all, I didn’t parachute in. I’ve been working on this for over ten years and secondly, if they don’t agree with it or appreciate it, they shouldn’t be involved in it.)

I asked Graber, Bluesky’s CEO, about Project Liberty’s pitch. “I think everyone involved in the interoperability conversation is saying, ‘Okay, you should use my protocol, and then we’ll be interoperable with everyone,'” she said. “DSNP is very stubborn. It defines the way you do data, the way you do identity. I have concerns about scalability. But if you want to test it, go ahead. We’re not opposed to that.” However, she did share some concerns about the DSNP adoption strategy “I tend to approach things by asking, ‘Where’s the adoption?’ and “What is the practical approach to doing things?” “Trying to standardize a protocol for everyone before it’s widely adopted means you might also get it wrong about what you’re standardizing,” Graber told me.

When it comes to TikTok, Graber seemed more concerned with the fate of the company’s algorithm. “A lot of the controversy is driven by how the algorithm works and the fact that there’s only one algorithm, and it can be quite addictive,” she said. Bluesky allows users to design their own social media algorithms. Likewise, US-owned TikTok may not have the same kind of new and surprising content as the current version, but it may allow users to choose the type of content they want to see more freely. People can subscribe to the cute animal algorithm, for example, or one that offers beauty tips. “I think opening up algorithms to the algorithmic market is a really healthy intervention,” Graber told me. “Just make it very easy for most users, give them the ability to choose, and then make sure the data is open.”

Project Liberty was using the summit to launch another technology initiative, what the group calls Login with Liberty, a way to browse the Internet as an individual independent of data, without having to hand over personal information. On the second day of the conference, Braxton Woodham, one of the founders of Project Liberty’s DSNP protocol, played me a short video on how the new service works. “Imagine a unique online identity of your own, where you control how other companies interact with your data, and where you own your communications and content across apps,” an audio clip showed a woman posting about her trip to Miami on two separate social media platforms. “Join us on the popular web and log in with Liberty.” The video ended, but I remained unclear on what “Sign in with Liberty” entailed. Woodham, a rocket scientist by training who was previously chief technology officer at Fandango, recalls how Facebook and Google tried to get users to log in to different sites using private accounts. Project Liberty wanted to provide a non-corporate alternative to this type of login. The acquisition of TikTok would give the group millions of users to offer them this option.

Login with Liberty could eventually resemble something like the Energy Star logo on home appliances, which indicates energy-efficient products, Woodham continued. Most consumers don’t know exactly what the Energy Star label means, but they like their appliances to carry the label. “We look at change at the consumer level that way,” Woodham said. “It’s not a revelation feature.” It was about gradually changing expectations.

At the Cape, McCourt was eager to show me the full extent of his holdings. We hopped on a golf cart and drove from the main house, across the street, into a wooded preserve filled with tall pines, where McCourt, a “stonehead” — as in he loves granite — has set up a series of stone installations of his own design. One piece, a sphere that appears to float as summer ferns grow around it, was completed in 2019, shortly after the death of his mother, at the age of one hundred and two, and the birth of one of his sons. This period seems to have opened something in McCourt. That was the same year that planning for Project Freedom began. “I don’t know if it was confidence, maturity, or the ability to express myself in a way that was consistent with the journey I felt I was on,” he told me.

We drove to a small hill located in the forest. McCourt stopped at a stone wall with a poem he wrote engraved on it. “It’s about seeing what you’ve never seen before,” he said. “He was there, but you didn’t see him.” He said people always seem to be on the move, agitated but perhaps not “really listening and observing and absorbing.” We walked up a small slope, past a dry wall, to a Zen garden with a lily pond. He directed me to pose for a photo under the Willow Arch, where he told me that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web — and supporter of the Freedom Project — was also standing.

As we walked out of the gardens, I asked McCourt if the Freedom Project was, in part, an atonement for past wrongs. He told me: It is not atonement for sin. But he thinks about his work through the lens of magnanimity, a concept popularized by Thomas Aquinas and later Ignatius Loyola. “It’s the idea of ​​doing whatever is necessary,” he said. “So, if it’s necessary to be a follower and wash other people’s feet, that’s what you do. If it’s necessary to do something very bold, that’s what you do.” I found myself imagining what Aquinas might think about the TikTok show.

At the Freedom Project summit, McCourt seemed concerned that his broader Internet project had succumbed to the hype around the app’s sale. He added: “The way the media works is to focus on the issue of the moment.” “And that’s both good and bad.” He admitted that the speculation surrounding TikTok had “raised” Project Liberty’s profile. But Cape seemed as unsure as anyone else about what might happen to the app after January 19. “I think it’ll sell,” McCourt said as he wheeled the golf cart across a vast expanse of grass. “Now, get this — is it an insider-type deal and nothing changes except ownership? Or is it, you know, not an insider-type deal and everything changes, because it’s an opportunity to start fixing the internet, not just fixing TikTok?”

McCourt’s political donations were largely directed to Democratic candidates, but he remained optimistic about the incoming administration. Some of Project Liberty’s technology projects rely on blockchain to allow users to transfer and control their online identity from one site to another. During his election campaign, Trump promised to make the United States “the cryptocurrency capital of the planet.” “I think with Trump, projects like this got a really huge boost because of his belief in blockchain technology,” McCourt told me. “This is much bigger for this project than TikTok.” (Later, he told me that the Musk rumor was noteworthy because it was the first public indication that the Chinese might be open to selling.)