Frank McCourt, the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2004 to 2012, has announced his bid to purchase the popular social media platform TikTok.
As the China-based parent company ByteDance faces the threat of a U.S. ban, McCourt is stepping forward with Project Liberty, an initiative aimed at establishing a new open-source decentralized internet. In collaboration with investment banker Guggenheim Securities and law firm Kirkland & Ellis, McCourt plans to organize the acquisition. He intends to consult with various stakeholders, including academics, community leaders, parents, and technologists.
If successful, McCourt plans to migrate the platform to a new “digital open-source protocol.”
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“The foundation of our digital infrastructure is broken, and it’s time to fix it,” said McCourt in a press release. “We can, and must, do more to safeguard the health and well-being of our children, families, democracy and society. We see this potential acquisition as an incredible opportunity to catalyze an alternative to the current tech model that has colonized the internet.”
The corporate pursuit has attracted other well-known individuals, such as Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Jonathan Haidt, a renowned social psychologist and author of The New York Times bestseller “The Anxious Generation.”
“This proposal has my support. The web I invented was to provide power and value to individuals, which they do not have at the moment. Users should have an ability to control their own data, to share it with other people and organizations as they choose,” Mr. Berners-Lee said in a statement. “A TikTok utilizing open internet protocols, such as Solid, will embrace the critical values of privacy, data sovereignty, and user mental health.”
According to Mr. Haidt, society’s relationship with technology is at “a tipping point,” and Mr. McCourt’s new vision and solutions for TikTok are “needed to move ahead in the digital age.”
Other notable figures, like former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Kevin O‘Leary, the chairman of O’Leary Ventures and host of the popular “Shark Tank” series, have also expressed their intentions to acquire TikTok.
However, even if TikTok is bought by an American entity, the app might undergo significant changes due to Chinese export regulations governing the transfer of its algorithm.
As ByteDance and TikTok engage in legal battles against the forced divestiture of the app, the future of TikTok remains uncertain.
