The Current - The ‘people’s bid’ to buy TikTok — and rewild the internet

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

American billionaire Frank McCourt wants to buy TikTok in the U.S., with a plan that would rewire the app’s addictive qualities and give users more control over their experience and data. We look at the bid — and the case for building a new and improved internet.

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered.

Available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. We're going to have a lot of people bidding on it and if we can signal that voice at all the jobs and China won't be involved, you don't want China involved, but we'll see what happens. US President Donald Trump wants a bidding war over TikTok. In his first day in office, Donald Trump postponed the enforcement of the Biden administration's ban on the social media platform, giving the app's Chinese owner bite dance time to find a US buyer.

Donald Trump says he wants the US to have 50% ownership and he's open to billionaires like Elon Musk or Larry Ellison, chairman of Oracle, buying that social media app. Earlier this week, the president also said that Microsoft was interested in in discussions. One billionaire jockeying to buy TikTok is the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, real estate mogul Frank McCourt. But he's interested for perhaps a unique reason. He says it is an opportunity to rewire how social media works and give users control over their own data. We'll talk about the broader push to imagine and build a new and improved internet in just a moment, but we begin with that offer by Frank McCourt. Claire Malone is a staff writer at The New Yorker who wrote about

his bid. She joins us now. Claire, good morning. Good morning. Who is Frank McCourt? Frank McCourt, not the deceased Irish writer of some note. Worth mentioning that, yes. Worth mentioning because it came up a lot, at The New Yorker at least, is a guy who came from a big Boston construction family, made his own millions and then billions

in real estate and owning sports teams. He famously owned the Dodgers and owns some actually like horse jumping circuits or did own them and owns a French soccer team. And he's a guy who's, you know, he's a low billionaire. His net worth is maybe under two billion, let's say. But he has developed over the course of his lifetime, an interest in what he calls digital personhood,

which is basically the idea that, you know, we now live in a corporate internet where when you sign online, you click all these accept term buttons and you're giving away your data and that shouldn't happen. Just as in the real world, you should own your, technologists would call it your social graph,

and he calls it, he spent some time, I think, with ethicists who talk about this, but they're calling it your digital personhood. So Frank has gotten really interested in that in the past two decades. You went to his estate in Cape Cod. Yeah, yeah. And he tooled you around in this area and that area, and you saw the sculptures. for the last two decades. You went to his estate in Cape Cod. He tooled you around in this area and that area,

and you saw the sculptures. I find that interesting in part because it gives a bit of a picture as to who he is and what he's trying to do. What is he like? I would say that Frank is a very intense person. He's very smart, and he's very earnest. And I'll tell you what I mean by that because I think it's probably not a word

that you would think to have ascribed to a billionaire. You brought up the Dodgers ownership earlier. Frank had a very sort of disastrous end to his Dodgers ownership. His wife was the CEO of the Dodgers. They got divorced. He fired her, the team eventually went into bankruptcy,

he was sort of hated by everyone in LA, it seemed like, and that was around the time when, you know, sort of the tabloid internet was rising. So everyone had something to say about it, and I think he was really scarred by the toll that took on him, on family his kids and he started becoming interested in the internet and its power. And i think also you know he is a person who has his four four kids from his first marriage. Four young kids from his second marriage he's he's sort of very worried about what the internet does

to young minds. And so I think all of those things swirling together sort of makes him, at least in this area of his life, a very earnest person about kind of the moral quandary that the internet presents to us. And he's putting his money where his mouth is. He's put hundreds of millions of dollars into this nonprofit Project Liberty, which he says is committed to a people-powered internet.

What does that mean? Project Liberty is an interesting mix of, they have a little technology lab, they give grants to academic institutions, and what they're trying to do is strip away some of the corporate gates that you have to walk through to be on the internet today. So basically what they want people to operate on is something that is commonly known as the Fediverse sort of colloquially, which is, you know, websites where you can

browse and take your data with you and if you don't like the rules of let's say, you know, Twitter, you'd be able to just say, by Elon Musk, I'm taking all of my followers of let's say, you know Twitter you'd be able to just say bye Elon Musk I'm taking all of my followers. There's no, you know social ramifications to me leaving because I I won't have to build up followers And new and a random other site I'm just gonna take them with me and the idea is that you're giving people on the internet more Agency to make decisions and when they don't like the rules then they can vote with their feet and walk away. In this country, people are very concerned about misinformation and disinformation and the impact on democracy.

Is that something that he is seized by? Very much so. I think it's at the fore of his mind. I mean, you know, with TikTok specifically, you know, there's just an inordinate number of Americans under 30 who see TikTok as their primary source of news, and they might not get their news from journalists like you or me,

they might get them from influencers. And I'm sure there's some influencers who are doing a great job, and there are some who are spreading misinformation. So this idea, it comes back to, can you have a thriving, functioning democracy if the citizenry is miseducated, misinformed. And so one of the things he wants to do to kind

of shape that is get his hands on TikTok. And he's formed this group, the People's Bid for TikTok, which we should say also includes Mr. Wonderful, the Canadian entrepreneur, Kevin O'Leary. People might know him from Shark Tank. What do we know about this bid? So the People's Bid is run out of Project Liberty. And it's basically, you know, for a while, Frank What do we know about this bid? So the people's bid is run out of Project Liberty.

And it's basically, you know, for a while, Frank has been trying to get essentially users to populate his technologies that he thinks will, you know, power this data autonomous internet. So he has starting last spring when there were all these when Biden signed the law saying Tiktok is banned unless it gets an American owner, Frank sort of saw an opportunity. And I think it's a bit of a you know, he would never tell you that it's not a serious thing. And I do think he takes it incredibly seriously. He's, you know, brought on, you know, Guggenheim securities, very serious law firms, very serious, you know, there's a lot of serious people working for

him. On the other hand, it's an opportunity for him to spread the good word about his internet project. So in some ways, Project Liberty is more important to him than buying TikTok. But the idea of buying TikTok for him was, what if we could get 170 million Americans who use TikTok to opt into browsing the internet in the data autonomous way that we would provide them? And part of that is about not taking the algorithm that makes TikTok insanely addictive, right? Correct, correct. Yeah. So, you know, and Frank says this is sort of his, the way he would have a cutting edge in the deal is that he doesn't want the algorithm that, you know, and Frank says this is sort of his, you know, the way he would have a cutting edge in the deal is that he doesn't want the algorithm that, you know, American senators have said is, you know, capable of sending Americans propaganda.

The fact, you know, there's some worry that maybe the Chinese are gathering blackmail on young Americans to use later on when they join the CIA or the military service. Anyway, so Frank says, I don't want your dirty algorithm. I'm going to do my own clean. He calls it his American built tech stack. Good branding. And it's basically, you know, that version of TikTok without the algorithm will be much less. He puts it at $20 billion, still a lot, but if you compare it to estimates of what TikTok might be worth with the algorithm,

that's something like $200 billion. And he says, you know, listen, this is a version that will satisfy all the national security requirements, and we're gonna make it a sort of safer place to browse. I would guess that like in the Frank McCourt Project Liberty version of TikTok, maybe it looks something a little bit more like Instagram Reels because, you know, the TikTok algorithm is really powerful and proprietary and sort of, you know, immediately seizes upon, oh,

you're interested in this and you don't even know it. And it's, you know, so I think it would be a slightly different user experience. But the general idea is no algorithm and a kind of cleaner back end when it comes to data and people owning their data. Do people want this? You know, I think the thing with Frank's project that, you know, lots of people I talked to who are in the space are very critical of is it's a nonprofit. It's not a company that's sort of putting forth a specific technology. People often don't like to be bought, right? And I think,

you know, when you get down to it, a lot of Americans who use TikTok really like the Chinese algorithm. That's why they use it in part, because it's addictive and it's fun and it just burns your time away. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, it's kind of one of those things where, you know, a lot of people,

it's just the running joke, right? Everyone who kind of knows TikTok's not good for them and yet you keep going back to it because it is addictive. So I think that's a, it's a really good question. Do people want it? I think the answer is like, you know in most cases in life You'd probably rather follow the frictionless route of let's not change anything Which you know, maybe a good segue is might actually happen under the Trump administration Just before I let you go

We're gonna talk in just a moment about this idea, and this is what Frank has been talking about, this idea of kind of changing what the internet is, rewilding the internet, taking it back to maybe what that promise was back in the old days before it was corrupted by money and power and all the things in between. What is intriguing to you about that?

Yeah, I think, I mean, I remember, you know, a time before the internet was this corporate. It was kind of the first internet I browsed. And things do feel different online. I mean, you can even go online and look at, you know, you can open up Blue Sky and it feels very different. The tenor of conversation is very different than say, you open up Twitter and it's a very, you know, I would say a little bit more of a caustic conversation. So even

just the tenor of the internet feels a little bit different, which is not to say that the old internet wasn't mean. I mean, we all remember crazy blogs, but so there's something to me about the kind of tone of Social life on the internet that feels a bit curdled Which makes me interested in you know, the idea of rewilding, you know, would we all would we all be nicer if we were? A bit more in control. It's almost like the broken windows theory of the internet. I'm not sure. I mean, I also think I'm a little bit of a, I am both not someone ensconced in the technology of this and a little bit of a skeptic. So I'm sort of thinking, well, will we look, will our internet look any different in five years? I hope. But I also know that, you know, technology companies are powerful and the power of inertia to kind of keep things as they are for users is something real.

So I'm intrigued by the idea, that's for sure. Being nicer would be good. Being nicer would be good. Claire, thank you very much for this. Thank you so much for having me. Claire Malone is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal.

I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Our next guest has thought a lot about how to make a better internet. Robin Bergen is a technologist. He specializes in digital governance and he's part of a newly launched group called Free Our Feeds. Their aim is to save social media from billionaire capture.

He's in Brussels. Robin, hello to you. Good morning. I want to talk about this initiative that you've created in a moment, but let's start in an unusual place. You wrote a piece called We Need to Rewild the Internet. And you talk about an 18th century German forest. What does an 18th century forest in Germany

have to do with the internet? That's a really good question. So one way to think about it is that a forest is a rich and diverse ecosystem in which every animal, every plant, every insect, everything feeds off one another. That creates a lot of resilience. It creates a rich system in which the diversity of culture makes the entire forest much more resilient and ultimately much more livable.

What happened in the 18th century is a bunch of people, particularly in Germany initially and then it spread to the rest of Europe, figured out that by standardizing the kind of wood that could be grown by turning a forest essentially into a monoculture, they could make a lot of money. We might think of them as the initial growth hackers. The problem is because by simplifying the system and controlling it and driving it towards a single point of optimization, they also impoverished the forest and they impoverished all these processes that makes a forest grow and makes a forest resilient. And so the next generation of that forest became so weak that the Germans had to invent a new word to describe forest death because essentially

none of the old growth system continued to work and all the trees were susceptible to the same pests, to the same storms, etc. and the entire forest died out. How do you see that as a parallel to, I mean, part of this is about what the internet used to be, right? How decentralized the internet was at its origin. Right, yes. So if you look at a forest, essentially in an old growth forest,

everything is infrastructure for everything else. So everything supports everything else. And this enables this richness, this diversity to grow. The initial internet was very much like that. If you think of it as infrastructure, and by that I mean, not just the cables and the service, but the entire protocols and all the system. Comparing it to real-world infrastructure,

physical world infrastructure, all the time that you don't spend worrying about clean water, about switching the light on, about flushing the toilet, it's time that you can spend on work or family or writing a novel, et cetera. And the initial internet was like that, which also mirrors the way in which ecosystems work. And this triggered a rush of growth and creativity

and invention. And because the internet didn't shape what people could do, it was multicultural. It wasn't like this monoculture. It unleashed, you know, connections between people and this whole like diverse ecosystem of behaviors emerged. And of course, we all know that they don't last. What happened to that promise? So, you know, the problem is essentially whoever controls infrastructure controls the future. There's a huge amount of power in infrastructure itself and almost all the underlying systems of the internet

are infrastructural in nature. What does that mean? Can you just explain before we continue, just explain what that means in terms of the infrastructure of the internet? Sure, so the comparison I like to use is to compare it for instance to the road system road system. Roads are very open in how we can use them. You can use them for tourism, maybe to visit a friend. You can use them for merchandise.

You can run traditional engines, electric engines. You can run cars, trucks, bikes, etc. And also, they're typically governed democratically. And we can decide, for instance, on limiting emissions, dedicating a lane to public transportation. We can return some of it to greenery. It's not a perfect system, but it works. And if you compare that to the privatization of infrastructure as has happened on the internet, you get a very different world. The owner, again, if you assume that someone owns all the roads, they can decide that the fast lane is maybe only for Nazis or only for Cybertruck drivers.

Or they can also impose heavy taxes on the traffic, the way companies like Apple or Google apply taxes of 15, 30% on businesses and sometimes even more than that on, you know, in some activities. Corey Doctorow, who is a Canadian tech writer, has this phrase that he has coined, and shitification. What does that process look like to you?

Because he talks about that in the way of defining in some ways, the degeneration of that promise, how it started with one thing and then it became something much poorer. Right, so, intensification is a process that happens when there is no countervailing power. Again, these companies acquired so much power,

so much influence, and we have so few ways of checking that power and counterbalancing it, that they can essentially keep decreasing product quality without fearing to lose users. There are multiple ways of keeping checks on that kind of behavior. Typically a competitive market is one way to do it, but there is no competitive market on the internet for any kind of large-scale system. And so essentially you get what we're seeing today where to do it, but there is no competitive market on the internet for any kind of large scale system.

And so essentially you get what we're seeing today where social media companies are not trying to create feeds that really support you in your own life objectives. They're just trying to keep you there. You see Google search that is essentially, you know, flooding the zone with slop and there's very little in the way of pushback or control that people can apply to that. So what do we do about that? You have written that our online spaces, these are your words, our online spaces are not

ecosystems but plantations now. You compare them to like a cattle feedlot or an industrial chicken farm, which is maddening for the creatures trapped within them. So if we don't like that, if we want to escape the feedlot, how do you go about rewilding the internet? And it's interesting to look at rewilding in the environmentalist movement itself in that we see this transition from a phase

in which a lot of environmental activists were mostly complaining about large corporations and trying to get them to change, to shifting to a position where they're trying to get them to change, to shifting to a position where they're trying to act for change themselves. It's not necessarily enough, but it's certainly a positive transition and we think that we can do the same thing with the internet. The first thing that I would say we get from rewilding is hope. These companies are so powerful

that it often feels insuperable. But the situation is fixable. So we have to first understand that really it is fixable. We can change this. Despite the fact that we felt so disempowered for years and that a lot of us feel that we've lost agency, there are ways of reclaiming that. We need to take that concentrated power that monopolies and billionaires have and figure out ways of dispersing it. And that might look different in different situations, but essentially every tool in the toolbox is good.

So it might be, in some cases, it may be regulation, it may be lawsuits, it may be new technologies, it may be new products. And we need to bring the entire toolbox to bear. The regulation side of this is challenging because as we're seeing extremely clearly in the United States right now, but elsewhere as well, there's a direct global alliance between big tech companies and the far right. And the far right has enough power in many places to block regulatory approaches. But, you know, we have to remember that they are powerful, but they are still fringe. They're a small number.

And most people don't want that world. We still have democratic governments that can see the urgency and that can act. But also we have people who are building products. So I heard Claire before mention, for instance, Blue Sky. And that is, I think, one great example of a small team deciding to build an alternative to Twitter and building things that can go well beyond an alternative to Twitter as a foray into that new world.

There's also other teams worldwide working on similar things that might not have become quite as famous yet, but I think are slated to. What's important is that people have choices and can choose, you know, maybe I'm going to spend an hour on that algorithm that I know is not great for me, but is really fun. And then I'll switch to another algorithm. So if you have this algorithmic pluralism that's built into the system, people can make more informed decisions and can sort

of like navigate their lives around it. It's not like social media is the only thing that can be bad for you. And people generally overall tend to figure out ways of navigating their lives. Claire earlier mentioned this theory of like, you know, made almost fixing broken windows and making sure that your neighborhood can work better if you have a more diverse, a more open, a more human-friendly social media, for instance. And I think for me, this really reminds me of Jane Jacobs' work on making cities better for people. There was this whole trend at some point of making cities super top-down organized, where there would be like one area for work and another area for leisure. And this led to completely abandoned cityscapes

with high crime rates and all kinds of issues. Whereas if you intermix neighborhoods where you get local businesses and a school and then et cetera, you have like this, again, this rich ecosystem of local life that helps people, makes people happier and helps them take care of one another. And I think people actually really want that. It's difficult two decades into this, super corporate monocultured internet to remember what agency looked like,

to remember what self-governance looks like. But when people start to have it, as they are starting to experience it, for instance, on Blue Sky, my sense is they really enjoy it. The Jane Jacob thing is interesting because she wanted cities to be for people. I mean, and putting people at the center of this technology

is what you're kind of talking about there. Essentially, yes, and we don't tend to describe it that way because it feels like a kind of big and perhaps overused word, but like this is what democracy is about, right? It's not voting. It's essentially making sure that power is dispersed so that people can take care of themselves. If we don't do that, if we don't free our feeds in your language,

what do you think is at stake? I mean, essentially it's very difficult to have a successful society operate if people can't collaborate, if people can't have access to good information. And so I think we're looking at ultimately collapse. I think we won't be able to face the very significant issues that are in front of us as a society if we can't have a good information environment in the first

place. Some people discuss it in terms of a doom loop where the information environment is degraded, therefore people can collaborate less, therefore they have a lesser ability to mitigate climate change issues, and therefore that creates further problems for society that continue to drive people into authoritarian systems that then help degrade the information environment. And so you get this downwards loop. This sounds very negative, and it is, because that's the case in which we do nothing. But again, I really want to emphasize the fact that we can break out of this loop.

We can change the way technology works so as to support ourselves. There's a lot of people with great projects, the world around here in Europe, some in North America. I've met people from India. People from all over are really trying to solve this problem. I think there's very broad agreement now in the way that we didn't have five years ago or even maybe three weeks ago. I think seeing the oligarchs sitting in front of the cabinet at Trump's inauguration ended up convincing people who might have been on the fence before.

There's a lot we can do and there's a lot of attention to the problem and there's a lot of interest in solving it. So I really think five years from now we're going to be in a much better place. I hope you're right. Robin, thank you very much. Thank you. Robin Burjan is a technologist who specializes in digital governance, co-author of an essay called We Need to Rewild the Internet. He was in Brussels.