What drives the wealthy scion of one of America’s greatest industrial families to embark on a late-in-life crusade to overhaul the foundational infrastructure of the entire Internet? Something that not even exorbitant wealth can protect someone from: how mean people can be on the Internet.
During a messy, public divorce, which ultimately settled in 2011, Frank McCourt Jr., then owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, received a tremendous amount of backlash on the Internet from the team’s fans. The attention he expected, but not the vitriol.
“Obviously it comes with the territory,” McCourt says Fortune in an interview. “If you own a great franchise like the Dodgers in a big media market like Los Angeles, you get divorced. There will be a lot of noise, I understand.
But this was between 2010 and 2011, the birth of the social media era.
“Facebook was six or seven years old at the time and smartphones were ubiquitous,” he recalls. “I have seen how social media has become a weapon of defamation. People who weren’t necessarily well-intentioned could just say whatever they wanted and you had no way to defend yourself.
Ten years after that “very difficult time,” McCourt founded Project Liberty, an advocacy group dedicated to reforming the Internet and dismantling the power of big tech companies. For McCourt, one of the critical issues worrying Internet users is that a select few companies – he cites Alphabet, Meta and Amazon among others – collect excessive amounts of user data. These companies and many others, from tax preparers to automakers, collect everything from who a user’s closest friends are, to where they went on a particular day, to what their mood might be. They often use these vast amounts of data to make predictions about people’s lives and future behavior, with an accuracy that borders on clairvoyance.
Amazon, Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet did not respond to a request for comment.
Intellectuals and technologists around the world have written about the idea that the extraordinary power of a few technology companies has led to a new world order. Commentators have invented new terms like surveillance capitalism – coined by former Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff – or technofeudalism – as former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls it – to describe the world in which the aggregation of digital data merges with real-world monitoring, all while the reams of information collected enriches a select number of companies and individuals.
While the terminology may differ, the central idea is that these companies hold enormous power. Sometimes even on a par with that of a government. A centrist version of the story comes from tech blogger Ben Thompson, who in a recent post in his Stratechery newsletter wrote: “Over the last two decades, we have drifted toward a world still organized by nation states, but with a parallel politics. defined by American technology companies.”
McCourt wants to take the data controlled by Big Tech, and the power that comes with it, and give it back to Internet users through a new system called a “decentralized social networking protocol.” In essence, it’s the idea that the companies that dominate the Internet – Google for search, Amazon for shopping, Meta for social connections – would be forced to give up their monopolies on data collection. McCourt is now one of the latest thinkers to express his opinion on the state of the digital world.
For McCourt, our online presence being devoured by algorithms is not just about data collection, it is a question of personality. “All this information about us is our lived archive: it represents who we are in the digital age,” she says.
According to McCourt, that digital personality, which includes much of our lives even offline, belongs to the big technology companies. “If you said ‘describe yourself,’ you’d list a lot of attributes,” he says. “Well, these and tens of thousands of others are now all mapped by these large platforms. So they own you. They own me. And we need to fix this.”
Varoufakis, McCourt and their ilk believe that tech companies maintain their power by being black boxes inaccessible to ordinary online users.
“He’s very controlling and manipulative,” McCourt says. “I would say it is completely at odds with democratic ideals. The secret sauce in America has not been centralization, autocrats ruling us, and 24/7 surveillance. It’s about individual freedom, choice, and autonomy.”
Worse still, according to McCourt, is that they then sell the data to advertisers for large sums of money. In 2023, Meta earned $131.9 billion from ad sales, while Alphabet earned $65.5 billion from ad sales in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone.
“Everything we do in our digital lives, which is a ton, is surveilled and mapped,” McCourt says. “This is the Holy Grail of the commercial internet today. It means having all this information about us, so that we can be sold things, shown what to read, or how to think, or how to be triggered, because these algorithms know more about us than we know about ourselves.
McCourt sees a big dissonance in the fact that while people create data, companies own it. Instead, he wants users to own their data and then, if they want, choose to sell it to advertisers. This could be useful if they are in the market for a certain product, according to his recently published book Our greatest battle: reclaiming freedom, humanity and dignity in the digital agewritten in collaboration with Michael Casey, chief content officer at CoinDesk.
“We are the ones with the data; companies, charities and other entities that wish to use it should offer us something in return,” McCourt and Casey write.
What is a decentralized Internet?
McCourt says everyday internet users have gotten cruel treatment, trading all of their privacy for a free app or online service. It’s a deal they wouldn’t have agreed to in the real world. If a company offered free stamps for life, but in exchange asked to read your mail, “put cameras in every room of your house to watch you 24/7” and “benefit from all your relationships, thoughts and feelings, we say ‘you’re crazy,’” McCourt says.
Essentially McCourt questions the adage that governs much of online life: If it’s free, then you are the product.
To mitigate that risk, he argues, people should be able to own their data. In the new Internet McCourt envisioned, users would set their own terms of use, and if a company agreed, their information would be made available for ad targeting or intelligence gathering.
McCourt compares much of the work he is doing to RCN, a telecommunications company founded by his brother David McCourt in 1993. The company’s big innovation at the time, according to McCourt, was allowing people to own their own phone number so that it would remain theirs when they moved from one telephone company to another. This meant they didn’t have to contact all their friends and family with their new contact information. This new interoperability, he says, was critical to creating a competitive phone industry that didn’t keep consumers stuck with the same provider because of the inconvenience of having to get a new phone number. McCourt argues that the same should apply to the digital world, with data online. Users should be able to take their data with them wherever they go on the Internet.
“People had a visceral emotional reaction to owning a phone number, I think they would definitely have an even stronger reaction to owning information, data and social graphs online,” McCourt says.
To make this happen, McCourt wants to create a new Internet protocol that would make safeguarding individual privacy a built-in feature of the new Internet. Just like previous Internet protocols like TCP/IP that allowed devices to connect to each other; and was then followed by HTTP, which essentially gave everyday computer users the opportunity to access the Internet via a web browser, becoming the foundation of contemporary online life. None of these protocols are owned by a single company, which is why using the Internet generally provides the same experience on any device and regardless of what website or app someone uses. No company “owns” the Internet, hence the term decentralized.
“If we as humans are the users of the Internet,” says McCourt, “and if our relationships and our data and our information are what create value, why not create another protocol layer that would actually liberate the data, so that it is not owned by these large platforms, but rather embedded in the Internet itself?”
This echoes proposals made by other Internet luminaries, including computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, considered one of the founders of the Internet. Berners-Lee, also a critic of the concentration of data in the hands of large corporations, has “a vision for an alternative world, where data exists, but is at the beck and call of the users themselves,” he said Time in 2019.
Businesses will lead the way, governments will follow
For McCourt, the solution will require new companies to model this new digital world he imagines. “We have to innovate our way out of this situation, because I don’t think the government will be able to regulate us out of this mess,” she says.
Instead, businesses will have to show governments the way.
“What they really need is technology that enables and realizes these public policy goals,” says MCCourt. “Rather than trying to limit something that is causing harm and is out of control, why not simply harmonize the technology with social policy goals?”
The European Union has made important progress in passing laws intended to regulate major technology companies. In 2016, the bloc passed the General Data Protection Legislation, considered one of the strictest data privacy laws in the world. It also passed two new pieces of legislation – the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act – intended to limit the influence that major industry players could exert on digital marketplaces, such as app stores and digital ad exchanges. Project Liberty’s calls for a decentralized internet have a “large audience in Europe” because they see the new protocol as consistent with the continent’s public policy goals, McCourt says.
One thing the government will need help with is recovering personal data from companies that already have it, if it one day passes a law creating a decentralized Internet. “The problem would be solved moving forward… but if you want your archival data, you should be able to get it.”
Until then, McCourt continues to bang the drum for what he sees as the injustice of current online life. “We’re not even citizens in the digital world,” he says. “We are subjects. We are just data for these big platforms. It’s very dehumanizing, it’s like sucking the life out of us.”