Bringing People’s Bid Through Project Liberty: Saving TikTok from the Court of a High-Judicial-Censorship Decision
The court’s decision leaves TikTok with few avenues for survival. One possibility is that President-elect Donald Trump could find a way to “save” the beloved platform come January, something he promised to do on the campaign trail. But beyond winning a final legal appeal at the Supreme Court, which is far from guaranteed, finding a wealthy buyer in the US may be TikTok’s most viable option.
McCourt’s motivation isn’t just to save TikTok but to bolster a personal project of his. He’s made what he calls a people’s bid through his project, bringing together investors and groups that share his vision of a more open internet. He would use Project Liberty’s Decentralized Social Networking Protocol to achieve this. The protocol would allow for users to export over their friends and followers to a new TikTok. And after Friday’s court decision, McCourt is more confident than ever that his team will soon be running and possibly rebuilding the app.
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.)
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.”
My belief is that there are different pieces of Project Liberty. You have the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP) and then there is the TikTok bid. It’s a bit outside from the things you have 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.
Then I realized that the public policy making apparatus is no match for Big Tech, so I began to go back to my roots. The infrastructure that my family has been building for 131 years actually isnt very far away from our core competency since it is at the base layer. If you had no limitations, I spoke to a few brilliant computer scientists at the company who were able to solve the problem from an engineering perspective. The answer was that you should create a new protocol that would connect us like the old ones.
Our ultimate goal is bigger than that of TikTok. It’s reimagining how the internet works. Buying TikTok and transferring 170 million people to an upgraded internet would speed things up.
Project Liberty, DSNP, FOCUS, Frequency, and the long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban
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. DSNP has been gifted to the world. That is being supported by the institute.
The layer-one blockchain, Frequency, is tokenized. The majority of the token will be owned by the community. It will be a commercial endeavor when we buy it.
It probably wouldn’t be a problem because I don’t know how you would achieve the objectives we want to achieve, which is to be able to run the platform without the Algorithm and give people control over their relationships. You need an implementation device 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’re saying that something has to change fundamentally with the internet. What Jay Graber is doing with Bluesky is great but you still have a Bluesky identity. You’re still on Bluesky and your relationships are on Bluesky. You’re still there, so let’s say that it’s better. Maybe Jay isn’t there at some point.
Keeping ByteDance afloat: The Long-Shot Plan to save Tik Tok from a US ban [[The Long-shot plan to save tiktok from an US ban]
People are very excited about it and capital won’t be an issue. The issue will be what ByteDance does. We felt the government would win the case and we have said so for over six months.
I don’t think ByteDance’s appeal is going to be successful. This will either be a sell scenario or a shut-it-down. I would like to see it not banned. We are not asking China for a program. We are not an antitrust threat. We’ll pass CFIUS vetting. We don’t think we need or want the algorithm. We have a clean stack where the user base can migrate.
Right now we have an order of magnitude what we think this is worth and that is what we have circled. I have a caveat: we do not 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. We have a good idea of what this would be worth with ByteDance keeping the formula and selling the user base and content.
There are three different types of investors. One group is the existing American companies that have invested in ByteDance. We’ve talked to most of them. They would be interested if ByteDance agreed to sell. They could either keep their capital in, or put more in.
A second category are people that are familiar with the asset because they’ve looked at it in the past. Some are looking at it for the first time. There are balance sheets that deploy big amounts of capital and they are interested in what we are doing. A bucket of cultural capital is a group of people who want to be part of this and make it happen.
Source: The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban
Project Liberty. The Long-Shot Plan to Save Tik Tok from a US Ban – Byddance for the Chinese App Store
That is correct. I reached out before the decision. They were not interested in speaking at that time. We will try it again. They know at this stage of the game that we exist, we’re interested, and we hope that there’s incoming at some point as well. But we respect their decision-making process. They are going to make a decision on what is best for them.
We are trying to reach out. I’ve heard President-elect Trump say he doesn’t want to see the app banned. Once it gets sorted on the China side, I am interested in having that discussion with them.
Some of the incumbents are not likely to be bidders here for a couple reasons. One is antitrust, obviously. If you were a tobacco company, you building a big business, and then people started to worry about people getting sick and dying because of the addiction of cigarettes and carcinogens. If you bought a tobacco company after the surgeon general warned about the dangers, then you are putting a target on your back because you know your product kills people.
Let’s use this problem to upgrade the internet. Then, a lot of the problems go away. A lot of the lawsuits go away. A lot of the harms are gone. That is Project Liberty.
Source: The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban
NeuralPS: What Happened at a Conference on Artificial Intelligence Safety, as Revised by The Verge’s Kylie Robison
Hundreds of the world’s top researchers gathered this week in Vancouver, Canada for NeuralPS, one of the world’s top academic gatherings in the field of AI. I asked The Verge’s Kylie Robison (who just published a fascinating deep dive on the history and future of ChatGPT) what it was like being there on the ground:
Sometimes, the “Is AI hitting a wall?” conversation comes up but it is not the place where people actually believe that. I talked about artificial intelligence safety a lot. One research topic that came up a great deal was how we use artificial intelligence to understand the world like we do with physics and objects. That touches a bunch of cool things — robotics, agents, advanced reasoning.
This conference was filled with students from Waterloo and University of Toronto who basically want any AI job. It was nice watching those students corner someone at a party. Everyone is trying to get as close to OpenAI as possible. This is a highly academic conference with lots of people just wanting to do good, deep research.
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. He also takes some shots at Google’s management culture versus Microsoft’s, which I’m sure will cause some eyes to roll in Mountain View, given the way Suleyman excited.
If you follow-up the conversation with Sayta’s interview this week, I recommend you listen to it. 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. For those following the stock price of Microsoft and graphics card companies, Microsoft no longer feels constrained by the power requirements of its data centers but rather constrained by the power requirements of its other computing devices.
Source: The long-shot plan to save TikTok from a US ban
The Command Line: The Case for a Decentralized Social Network Protocol to Support Frank McCourt’s Popular Buy-Sale of Command Line
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According to WIRED, McCourt said that he wants to keep some form of advertising on the app, and give people the ability to put their own recommendations in the app.
One of the most prominent prospective buyers to emerge so far is real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Frank McCourt, who says 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. Users of TikTok will be able to use the DSNP to export their friends to other apps.