Is the TikTok Ban a Chance to Rethink the Whole Internet?

The billionaire Frank McCourt is launching a “people’s bid” to buy the app, replace its addictive algorithm, and give users greater control of their data. Is it a publicity stunt or a sincere attempt to reform the digital age?

On a chilly morning in December, I pulled up the curving stone driveway of a hundred-and-twenty-acre oceanfront estate on Cape Cod. Frank McCourt—not the acclaimed dead Irish American writer, but the Boston-born billionaire real-estate magnate—bought the property twenty-five years ago, not long before he purchased the Los Angeles Dodgers from Rupert Murdoch. “I had an awesome life in L.A.,” he told me. “Every boy’s dream—own his own team, et cetera, et cetera. Everything was fabulous.”

In 2009, McCourt and his wife, Jamie, who was then the Dodgers’ C.E.O., separated, setting off years of sensational stories about the couple’s free-flowing personal spending and their supposed mismanagement of the Dodgers. (Among other things, they had reportedly hired a Russian healer to send good energy to the players.) During divorce proceedings, which resulted in a hundred-and-thirty-million-dollar settlement, the club went into bankruptcy. McCourt eventually sold the team for more than two billion dollars. Online, fans and the press were brutal; McCourt still inspires derision on Dodgers subreddits. “I saw how social media can be weaponized to attack anyone and discredit them and malign them,” McCourt said. “It’s very much like your house is burning down, and you have a garden hose with low water pressure to put out the fire while other people are pouring five-gallon cans of gasoline on it.”

McCourt calls his divorce his “big-bang moment,” the end of one life and the beginning of another. “The pain that my four sons endured,” he has written, inspired him to find a way “to help fix the toxic system that exacerbated it.” He has since given hundreds of millions of dollars to causes that promise to help restore humanity to the Internet. Most notably, in 2021, he created Project Liberty, a five-hundred-million-dollar initiative to fund academic research, develop new technologies, and connect those “committed to a people-powered Internet.” Its biggest release thus far is a protocol—the rules that devices use to communicate with one another—which is freely available and which promises to give users more autonomy over their online identities and experiences.

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