The Case for a Better Online Privacy Law: A Conversation with Andrew McCourt on the Status of the TikTok App Store in the United States

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.

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. Stay informed for more from our conversation this week.

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.

When asked if Project Liberty could maintain TikTok’s existing userbase without the beloved algorithm, McCourt said, “People don’t know what they don’t have until you show them.”

There are multiple pieces of Project Liberty according to my understanding. They are connected because of the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) and the TikTok bid. It seems a little out of place 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 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.

I went back to my roots after I realized that the public policy making apparatus is not up to the job of Big Tech. My family has been building infrastructure for 131 years, so this isn’t too far away from our core competency when you think about this not being a software layer but as a base layer. If there were no limitations, I told a few brilliant computer scientists at our company that they had to solve this from an engineering point of view. 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.

Our goal here is bigger than buying TikTok. It’s trying to find a better way to use the internet. Purchasing TikTok and moving 170 million people on the internet would make that alternative a reality.

The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban: Is it good for Jay Graber if he doesn’t like it?

I see it as both and we’ve been very careful to separate the two. Project Liberty has an institute, a 501(c)(3), that’s purely not-for-profit. The world has been given DSNP. That is being supported by the institute.

Frequency is the layer-one blockchain that is tokenized. The majority of the token will be owned by the community. TikTok, when we buy it, will be a commercial endeavor.

I don’t know how you can achieve our objectives, which is to be able to run the platform without the algorithm and give people ownership and control of their relationships. You need an implementor to use DSNP.

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.

We are saying that something needs to change with the internet. What Jay Graber is doing is great. 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? At some point maybe Jay is not 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: What Do We Want to See in ByteDance?

People are super excited about this and capital will not be an issue at all. The issue is going to be what ByteDance does. We’ve been saying for over six months that we felt the government was going to win the case.

I don’t think ByteDance’s appeal is going to be successful. This is going to either be shut-it-down or sell it. I want to see it not banned like President-elect Trump. We are not asking China for an idea on how to make a good program. We are not an antitrust threat. We will pass the vetting. We don’t need or want the algorithm. We have a clean stack where the user base can migrate.

That’s what we’ve got circled right now and that’s an order of magnitude what we think this is worth. 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. Most of them have been talking to us. They’re very interested, assuming ByteDance agrees to sell. They either invested more or kept their capital in.

People in the second category have looked at the asset before and are familiar with it. Some are looking at something for the first time. The balance sheets that deploy big amounts of capital are what they are interested in. The bucket of cultural capital is a group of people with influence interested in bringing their communities with them.

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

Project Liberty: A Long-Shot Plan to Save TikTok from a US Ban by Byte Diance (Emphasis on Project Liberty)

That is correct. I reached out before the decision. They were not interested in speaking at that time. We’ll try it again. At this point in time, they know that we exist, and hope that there is an Incoming at some point as well. But we respect their decision-making process. They will decide how to best serve their interests.

We’re in the process of reaching out. I’ve heard President-elect Trump say he doesn’t 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 likely to be bidders here for two reasons. One is antitrust, obviously. Secondly, imagine you were a tobacco company and you built a big business and then people started to get worried because people were getting sick and dying because of the addiction of cigarettes and carcinogens. If you bought a tobacco company after the surgeon general’s warning, then you were putting a target on your back because you were buying it with the awareness that your product kills people.

This is a problem that can be used to upgrade the internet. A lot of the problems go away after that. A lot of the lawsuits are thrown out. A lot of the harms are gone. That’s Project Liberty.

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

What was it like to be on the ground? Artificial intelligence at ChatGPT 2014, and what Has Microsoft Done recently about OpenAI? An interview with Jeff Gurley

One of the world’s top gatherings in the field of artificial intelligence is taking place in Canada this week. I asked The Verge’s Kylie Robison (who just published a fascinating deep dive on the history and future of ChatGPT) What was it like to be on the ground?

There is a conversation about artificial intelligence hitting a wall, but it’s not where people actually believe that. I talk a lot about safety for artificial intelligence. 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. That touches a bunch of cool things — robotics, agents, advanced reasoning.

Students from Waterloo and the University of Toronto were in the conference wanting to work with computers. At times it was great to see the students corner the Artificial Intelligence executive at a party. If parties are any indicator, everyone wants to get as close to OpenAI as possible. Many people want to do good, deep research at this conference.

There are plenty of interesting takeaways from Mustafa Suleyman’s recent Decoder interview with Nilay Patel. The Microsoft AI CEO doesn’t seem to agree with Sam Altman on the timing of AGI’s arrival, and he revealed that Microsoft won’t train its own frontier models when OpenAI is doing it for them anyway. I am pretty confident that there will be a reaction in Mountain View, since he takes shots at the management culture of Google and Microsoft.

This week is the time to listen to Sayta Nadella interview with Brad Gurley and Brad Gerstner. Reading between the lines, it’s clear that there is ongoing tension between the level of compute Altman wants and what Nadella feels comfortable spending. Microsoft feels constrained by the power requirements of its data centers, rather than by the resources it has, as was mentioned by Nadella for those following the stock price.

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

The Command Line: News and Features from Frank McCourt’s Real Estate Selling Bidding Campaign for a Recommender Algorithm

If you don’t already subscribe, you can get the new issue of Command Line and all of our stories, as well as an improved ad experience on the web. You’ll also get full access to my archive, featuring scoops about companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and more.

If you give me a tip, I want to hear from you. I will ping you securely if you respond here and I will get back to you. 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”).

One of the most prominent prospective buyers so far has been real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Frank McCourt who claims he has received $20 billion in informal commitments from investors to purchase the app as part of what he calls the people’s bid. The sale would bolster McCourt’s existing technology initiative Project Liberty and the so-called decentralized social networking protocol it has developed. DSNP could be incorporated into TikTok and allow users to export their friends from other apps.