The plan to save TikTok from a US ban

The Case for a Better Time to Fix the Status of TikTok: How Do We Stand Now? Why Do We Want to Fix It? Why Should We Care About It? What Do We Really Need?

Last Friday, a federal appeals court upheld a law that could result in the app being banned from operating within the United States next month. Even if President Joe Biden decides to extend that deadline an additional 90 days, TikTok is still on a pretty tight timeline to find a way out of this mess.

There are several reasons McCourt’s attempt to buy TikTok is a long-shot, the biggest being that, even if ByteDance wanted to sell, the Chinese government may not let it. Then there are the technical details of his proposal, which would see TikTok put on a decentralized protocol that is funded by McCourt and untested with a platform of TikTok’s size. For me, the most red flag is that there is a virtual currency called Frequency tied to the project.

The obvious names that would would buy TikTok if they could — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. — are sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see what happens in the coming weeks. The clock is ticking. Congress just sent letters to Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook reminding them that they will be legally liable for continuing to host TikTok in their app stores after January 19th.

Project Liberty could not maintain the existing userbase without the beloved algorithm, as per McCourt, who said people don’t know what they don’t have until you show them.

My understanding is there are multiple pieces of Project Liberty. You’ve got the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) and then the TikTok bid, and they’re connected. It seems a little out of line from what you’ve done before.

Having seen the harms of social media and where the internet was going as it became highly centralized, I dedicated some resources to start a public policy school at my alma mater, Georgetown. I thought that we could get the policymaking apparatus out in front of the problem and steer the direction of the school that was doing the wrong thing.

When I realized that the public policy making apparatus is incapable of competing with Big Tech, I went back to my roots. My family has been building infrastructure for 131 years, so this actually isn’t very far afield from our core competency when you think about this not as software at the app layer, but as infrastructure at the base layer. I talked to a few brilliant computer scientists that we have in the company and put the task to them of solving this from an engineering perspective if you had no limitations. The answer was that you should create another protocol that connects us like the ones you use to connect devices and data.

Our goal here is bigger than buying TikTok. It is rearranging how the internet works. Purchasing TikTok and moving 170 million people to a new internet would result in an alternative and compress time.

The Long–Shot Plan to Save TikTok from a US Ban [An analysis of Jay Graber’s Contribution to DSNP]

We have been careful to separate the two. The institute is solely not-for-profit and is managed by Project Liberty. DSNP has been gifted to the world. That is being supported by the institute.

The Frequency is tokenized. The community will own the majority of the tokens but that will be a commercial endeavor. TikTok, when we buy it, will be a commercial endeavor.

I have no idea how you can achieve the objectives we want to achieve, which is to give people their own control over their relationships and run the platform without the algorithm. DSNP requires an implementation device.

I admire all the people who are doing that because they are trying to improve the internet and respect individuals. A federated approach is very different than having a universal social graph that’s globally accessible.

Something has to change with the internet. What Jay Graber is doing is great. but you still have a Bluesky identity. You’re still on Bluesky and your relationships are on Bluesky. Let’s stipulate that it’s better but you’re still there, right? Maybe at some point Jay isn’t there.

Source: The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban

The Long-shot plan to save Tik Tok from a US ban: Is ByteDance selling its user base?

Capital won’t be a problem because people are excited about this. The issue is going to be what ByteDance does. For the past six months we have been saying the government was going to win the case.

I don’t think the appeal will be successful. This is going to be a shut-it-down or sell it scenario. Like President-elect Trump, I’d like to see it not banned. We’re not asking China for the algorithm. We are not an antitrust threat. We’ll be able to pass the vetting. We don’t need to use the algorithm. We have a clean stack where the user base can migrate.

It’s an order of magnitude what we think this is worth, and that’s what we circled right now. Now, I say that with a huge caveat: we don’t know what ByteDance is selling. We think we have a very good idea of what the current numbers are, but it’s not like there’s a data room that ByteDance has set up and we’re inside of it. I think we have a good sense of what this would be worth if ByteDance keeps the algorithm and sells the user base and the content and the brand.

There are three categories of investors. One group is the existing American companies that have invested in ByteDance. We’ve talked to most of them. They’re very interested, assuming ByteDance agrees to sell. They would either put more capital in or keep their capital in.

A second category are people that are familiar with the asset because they’ve looked at it in the past. Some are looking at it for the first time. They are interested in what we’re doing and deploy big amounts of capital on these large balance sheets. The bucket of cultural capital is people who are interested in being part of the cultural capital, bringing communities with them.

Source: The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban

Project Liberty: The Long-Shot Plan to Save TikTok from a US Ban by Bytedance for the Chinese Internet

That is correct. I talked to them before the decision was made. They were not interested in speaking at that time. We will try it again. They know at this stage of the game that we exist, we’re interested, and we hope that there’s incoming at some point as well. We understand their decision-making process. They are going to make a decision on what is best for them.

We are reaching out. I have heard that Trump does not want to see the app banned. I’m very interested in having that conversation once this gets sorted on the China side and they decide what they’re going to do.

The big incumbents are not expected to be bidders for a couple of reasons. One is antitrust, obviously. Imagine if you were a tobacco company and you started a big business, then people started to worry because of the addiction of cigarettes and carcinogens, and then people got sick and died. If you bought a tobacco company after the surgeon general warned, then you were putting a target on your back because you knew you were buying a product that killed people.

Let’s take this problem and actually use it to catalyze an upgraded internet. There are a lot of problems that go away. There is a lot of lawsuits that go away. There are a lot of harms gone away. That’s Project Liberty.

Source: The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban

Neural PS: What’s Happening at the Ground Floor of Artificial Intelligence? Discussion with Robison, Gurley, and Gerstner

The world’s top scientists gathered in Canada this week for Neural PS, a gathering in the field of artificial intelligence. I asked The Verge’s Kylie Robison (who just published a fascinating deep dive on the history and future of ChatGPT) what it was like being there on the ground:

The chatter about the artificial intelligence hitting a wall is something that comes up sometimes, but it’s not something people really believe in. It was something I talked about a lot. A research topic that also came up a lot was what Fei-Fei Li focuses on, which is helping AI understand the world like we do in terms of physics and objects. A bunch of cool things are touched by that.

Students from Waterloo and University of Toronto were at the conference who want to work with computers. There were days when it was sweet to watch those students corner an official of a company. If parties are any indicator, everyone wants to get as close to OpenAI as possible. This is a highly academic conference with lots of people just wanting to do good, deep research.

There are plenty of interesting takeaways from Mustafa Suleyman’s recent Decoder interview with Nilay Patel. Microsoft won’t train their own models when Openai is doing it for them because the Microsoft CEO doesn’t seem to agree with that timing. I am sure that he will cause some to roll their eyes in Mountain View due to his shots at Microsoft’s management culture.

As a follow-up to this conversation, I recommend listening to Sayta Nadella’s interview this week with Brad Gurley and Brad Gerstner. It is clear from the lines that there is tension between the levels of compute and what Nadella feels comfortable spending. For those closely following Nvidia’s stock price, Nadella also mentions that Microsoft no longer feels GPU constrained but rather constrained by the power requirements for its data centers.

Source: The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban

Command Line, The Verge, and Wired: Managing a Public App in the 21st Century (by Frank McCourt)

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As always, I want to hear from you, especially if you have a tip or feedback. Respond here, and I’ll get back to you, or ping me securely on Signal. I’m happy to keep you anonymous.

WIRED spoke with McCourt earlier this week about what else he would do with the app, including keeping some form of advertising (“People, in America in particular, like to buy things,” he says) and letting people curate their own recommendation algorithm (“It’s a much better model”).

The former owner of the LA Dodgers, Frank McCourt, has emerged as one of the most prominent prospective buyers and he says that he has received $20 billion from investors to purchase the app. The sale would bolster McCourt’s existing technology initiative Project Liberty and the so-called decentralized 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.