Save TikTok from a US Ban

ByteDance’s TikTok Dilemma: A Long Shot for McCourt’s Acquisition

So far, ByteDance has shown zero willingness to spin off TikTok in the US. The Chinese parent company seems to be banking on the Supreme Court or President-elect Donald Trump rescuing the app before it’s banned next month.

The obvious names that 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.

Then there’s Frank McCourt, the real estate billionaire and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers. For months, McCourt has been very public about his desire to buy TikTok. He has ramped up his drumbeat since ByteDance recently lost its legal fight on appeal. This week, he pitched more investors on his Project Liberty plan to buy the app’s US operations.

When I spoke with McCourt over Zoom in between those investor meetings, he told me he currently has roughly $20 billion behind him for a bid. He has asked Kevin Mayer, who was briefly TikTok’s CEO the last time it was almost banned from the US, to be involved, though Mayer hasn’t signed on. McCourt told me his team has talked to "most" of ByteDance’s biggest American investors and that they’re "very interested" in his plan. (Spokespeople for these firms either declined to comment or didn’t respond to my pings, and Mayer didn’t have a comment.)

McCourt’s Acquisition Plan: A Long Shot

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 biggest red flag of all is that there’s a cryptocurrency called Frequency tied to the project.

McCourt has high-minded ambitions for how the internet should work that are in line with the rise of federated platforms like ActivityPub and Bluesky. He imagines TikTok offering a marketplace of user-created algorithms, much like Bluesky does today, and users having the ability to own their profiles.

Q&A with Frank McCourt

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 all seems a little bit afield from what you have historically done.

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 was perhaps naive in retrospect, but I thought that we could get the policymaking apparatus out in front of the problem and steer things in a better direction out of that school.

Then I realized that the public policy making apparatus is no match for Big Tech, so I began to go 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 came back that you would go ahead and create another protocol that would connect us, just like TCP/IP connects devices and HTTP connects data.

Job Board

A few notable job moves this week:

• Rohan Anl, a DeepMind distinguished engineer and head of Gemini pretraining, joined Meta to help lead training for Llama.
• Zheng Gao, Tesla’s former head of hardware design for Autopilot, joined Zoox as director of hardware engineering.
• Google’s chief lobbyist, Mark Isakowitz, left to be chief of staff for incoming Pennsylvania Republican Senator-elect Dave McCormick.

More Links

• Juicy new emails and texts from Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.
• We put Sora to the test and it was… fine?
• Cruise was reportedly planning "to launch a driverless service in Houston in 2025" before GM pulled the plug this week.
• Amazon is opening a new AI research lab in San Francisco.
• A deep, technical dive from SemiAnalysis on AI scaling laws.
• YouTube is the top social media platform for US teenagers followed by TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat.
• The global ad market is expected to surpass $1 trillion next year, with more than half going to Google, Meta, Amazon, ByteDance, and Alibaba.
• Ev Williams made a social network for people who travel a lot.
• Pat Gelsinger sends his prayers.
• One of Mark Zuckerberg’s gold (plated!) chains sold at auction for over $40,000.

Conclusion

McCourt’s bid to buy TikTok is a long shot, but it’s not entirely impossible. The technical details of his proposal are complex, and the decentralized protocol he’s proposing is untested with a platform of TikTok’s size. However, McCourt’s ambition to create a more decentralized and user-friendly internet is admirable, and his proposal is worth exploring further.

FAQs

Q: What is Project Liberty?
A: Project Liberty is Frank McCourt’s plan to buy TikTok’s US operations and put it on a decentralized protocol that is funded by McCourt and untested with a platform of TikTok’s size.

Q: Why is the Chinese government not allowing ByteDance to sell TikTok?
A: The Chinese government has not explicitly stated its stance on ByteDance selling TikTok, but it’s likely that it would not approve of the sale due to national security concerns.

Q: What is the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP)?
A: The DSNP is a protocol that would connect users and allow them to create their own algorithms, much like Bluesky does today.