A Boston billionaire says we need a new internet — so he's funding one

Boston billionaire Frank McCourt thinks the internet is broken. He goes so far as to say the way we use the internet today robs 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, Project Liberty. Among other things, the organization is building new technology, as well as bidding to buy the social media platform TikTok. In April, Congress passed legislation to require the app's Beijing-based owner, ByteDance, to sell TikTok to an American subsidiary or face a ban in the U.S. The legislation is currently facing legal challenges.

Frank McCourt joined WBUR's Radio Boston to talk about his mission, his Boston roots and his recent book, "Our Biggest Fight."

On the current internet problems Frank McCourt wants to address 

 "What I'm trying to do is to get people to see, to see their data as not some abstract concept, something that in this digital era as, as their personhood. The internet, when it started, was invented by people who thought it would be democratizing, that it would be a technology that would connect all of us ... But instead what has happened over the last 20 years is that the internet has been colonized.

"There are essentially five companies that now have co-opted it and the model that they use, driven by the advertising ad-tech economy, has shifted the internet completely from an open, decentralized, democratizing one to an autocratic, centralized surveillance-based ... which it's now controlling us.

"So these platforms have so much information on 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 is making judgments about how we think, how we emote, how we'll react, how we'll behave. They've made assessments of our personality and now we are manipulated by the internet technology we have."

On why McCourt wants to develop a 'new internet'

"I have seven children, so anyone that has children can see and, you know, what's happening to young people. ... I mean, you have arguably the most powerful technology that the world has ever known. ... It was never built or designed to do what it now is being used for.

"You need to design safety and trust into systems and into infrastructure before you build it, not after you've connected billions of people. ... We've moved fast and now we're breaking things. And we can do better. We must do better. And so it just can't be emphasized enough. ... We can fix this and the key thing we need to do is re-empower people and return the control and the ownership of the data."

On Project Liberty and McCourt's plans to implement changes to the internet

"It's happening now and just to take a step backward, the internet was enabled by a very simple core layer protocol, which connected devices. And then there was another very simple protocol that connected data and created the World Wide Web.

"We need another simple core layer protocol that connects and empowers all of us. So, I green lit the tech track of Project Liberty in December 2019 and some brilliant technologists have been hard at work for four and a half years now creating the protocol, it's open source, that's been released to the world.

"And starting last year, the first users started migrating to this new protocol, and we now have nearly a million people on this alternative internet. The reason I've put forward a people's bid for TikTok is to actually catalyze now and accelerate the creation of this alternative internet by migrating 170 million TikTok users to this."

On McCourt's bid to buy TikTok

"Well, the bid is on behalf of Project Liberty, and it is a people's bid. And what I mean by that is I want the users, you know, the people that currently create 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 either shut down TikTok or sell it, is an opportunity to actually migrate the user base to an alternative version of the internet where all 170 million users have control over their data."

More on Project Liberty

"Project Liberty is really focused on three things: One is a track to bring together people and institutions of like minds that want to fix this problem. Another track is creating a movement to socialize this and actually bring people together who are concerned about this. ... This is where, for instance, the parents who joined our bid for TikTok show up because they want to catalyze a movement, a social movement.

"And then there's the tech track, which is where DSNP (Decentralized Social Networking Protocol), this thin layered protocol has been created and gifted to. It's an open-source protocol."

On how his effort is different from 'passing the baton' of internet control from companies 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 control 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, versus an individual owning a platform."