Frank McCourt could do what he wanted with TikTok

Project Liberty and a People’s Bid for the TikTok App: Frank McCourt and the Los Angeles Dodgers

There are three options left for TikTok at this point. The company could win an appeal, forget about all of this, and go back to business as normal (eventually). Come next year, the app could be banned. Or, someone with a lot of money could buy TikTok’s US business off of ByteDance. Wednesday afternoon, my colleague. and I spoke to Frank McCourt, the billionaire former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers who wants to do just that.

McCourt’s motivation isn’t just to save TikTok but to bolster a personal project of his. Through his Project Liberty initiative, he has made what he’s called a “people’s bid,” bringing together a variety of investors and groups that share in his vision of a more open web. He would apply Project Liberty’s Decentralized Social Networking Protocol to TikTok. It would allow users to export their friends and followers to a new TikTok. And after Friday’s court decision, McCourt is more confident than ever that his team will soon be running and possibly rebuilding the app.

In our conversation, McCourt argued that a sale would make everyone happy, including ByteDance, users, and the US government. McCourt has offered $20 billion for the app’s brand, its user base, and the existing content in order to scale his vision of an interoperable, more privacy-friendly internet that competes with companies like Meta and Google. He doesn’t “need or want” the algorithm running TikTok’s For You page, he says.

When asked if Project Liberty could maintain the existing TikTok user base, McCourt said, “People do not know what they do not have until they see it.”

He told WIRED that he would keep some form of advertising and allow users to choose their own recommendation model when he was asked what else he’d do with the app.

Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, says he has received $20 billion in commitments from investors to purchase the app as a part of what he calls the people’s bid. The sale would bolster the technology initiative called Project Liberty and the so-called distributed social networking protocol it has developed. McCourt wants to incorporate the DSNP into TikTok and allow users to export their friends across other interoperable apps.