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What possesses the wealthy scion of one of America\u2019s greatest industrialist families to embark on a late-in-life crusade to overhaul the fundamental infrastructure of the entire internet? Something that even exorbitant wealth can\u2019t shield someone from: How mean<\/a> people can be on the internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n During a messy, public divorce<\/a>, which ultimately settled<\/a> in 2011, Frank McCourt Jr., then the owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, received a huge amount of internet backlash<\/a> from the team\u2019s fans<\/a>. The attention he expected, but not the vitriol.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOf course it comes with the territory,\u201d McCourt tells Fortune <\/em>in an interview. \u201cYou own a magnificent franchise like the Dodgers in a big media market like LA, you get divorced. There\u2019s going to be a lot of noise\u2014I get it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But this was 2010 to 2011, the birth of the social media age.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the time Facebook<\/a> was six or seven years old and smartphones were ubiquitous,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI saw how social media just became a weapon of character assassination. People who were not necessarily well-intended could just say whatever they wanted and you had no way of defending yourself.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Ten years after that \u201cvery difficult time\u201d McCourt founded Project Liberty<\/a>, an advocacy group dedicated to reforming the internet and breaking up the power of Big Tech companies. For McCourt, one of the critical issues troubling internet users is that a select few companies\u2014he names the likes of Alphabet<\/a>, Meta, and Amazon<\/a> among others\u2014collect inordinate amounts of data<\/a> on users. Those companies and plenty others\u2014ranging from tax preparers<\/a> to carmakers<\/a>\u2014collect everything from who a user\u2019s closest friends are, to where they went on a given day, to what their mood<\/a> might be. Often they use those vast swaths of data<\/a> to make predictions<\/a> about people\u2019s lives and future behavior, with an accuracy that borders on clairvoyance.\u00a0<\/p>\n Amazon, Meta, and Google\u2019s parent company Alphabet did not respond to a request for comment. <\/p>\n The idea that the extraordinary power of certain tech companies has led to a new world order has been written about by intellectuals<\/a> and technologists<\/a> across the globe. Commentators have invented new terms like surveillance capitalism<\/a>\u2014coined by former Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff\u2014or technofeudalism<\/a>\u2014as former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis calls it\u2014to describe the world in which digital data aggregation bleeds into real world monitoring, all while the reams of information collected enrich<\/a> a select few<\/a> companies and individuals.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the terminology may differ, the core idea is that these companies wield outsize power. Sometimes even on par with that of a government. A centrist version of the story comes from tech blogger Ben Thompson, who put it in a recent post<\/a> in his Stratechery newsletter: \u201cOver the last two decades, we have drifted to a world still organized by nation states, but with a parallel political economy defined by American tech companies.\u201d<\/p>\n McCourt wants to take the data controlled by Big Tech, and the power that lies with it, and return it back to internet users through a new system called a \u201cdecentralized<\/a> social networking protocol.\u201d In essence, it\u2019s the idea that companies that dominate the internet\u2014Google for search, Amazon for shopping, Meta for social connections\u2014would be forced to give up their monopolies on data collection. McCourt is now one of the latest<\/a> in the line of thinkers to have opined about the state of the digital world.\u00a0<\/p>\n For McCourt our online presence that gets devoured by algorithms isn\u2019t just about a collection of data points, it\u2019s a question of personhood. \u201cAll this information about us is our lived archive\u2014it\u2019s who we are in the digital age,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n That digital personhood, which comprises much of our life offline as well, belongs to big tech companies, according to McCourt. \u201cIf I said \u2018describe yourself,\u2019 you would list a bunch of attributes,\u201d he says. \u201cWell, those and tens of thousands of others are now all mapped by these big platforms. So they own you. They own me. And we need to fix that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Varoufakis, McCourt, and their ilk believe the tech companies maintain their power by being black boxes inaccessible to ordinary online users.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very controlling and manipulative,\u201d McCourt says. \u201cI 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\u2019s about individual freedom, choice and autonomy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Worse yet, according to McCourt, is that they then sell that data to advertisers for huge sums of money. In 2023, Meta made $131.9 billion from ad sales, while Alphabet made $65.5 billion from ad sales in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cEverything we do in our digital lives\u2014which is a ton\u2014is surveilled and mapped\u201d McCourt says. \u201cThat\u2019s the holy grail of the commercial internet now. It\u2019s 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 us.\u201d<\/p>\n McCourt sees a major dissonance in the fact that, while people create the data, the companies own it. Instead, he wants users to own their data and then, should they wish to, opt in to sell it to advertisers. That could be useful if they happen to be in the market for a certain product, according to his recently released book<\/a> Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age<\/em>, coauthored with CoinDesk<\/a> chief content officer Michael Casey.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re the ones with the data; the businesses, charities, and other entities wanting to use it should offer us something in return,\u201d McCourt and Casey write.\u00a0<\/p>\n McCourt says everyday netizens have gotten a raw deal, exchanging the totality of their privacy for a free app or online service. It\u2019s a deal they wouldn\u2019t have accepted in the real world. If a company offered free stamps for life, but in return asked to read your mail, \u201cput cameras in every room of your house to surveil you 24\/7,\u201d and \u201cbenefit from all your relationships, thoughts, and feelings, we would say \u2018you\u2019re crazy,\u2019\u201d McCourt says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Essentially McCourt is questioning the adage that governs much of online life\u2014if it\u2019s free, then you are the product<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n To mitigate that risk, he argues, people should be able to own their own data. In the new internet McCourt envisions, users would set their own terms of use<\/a> and if a company agreed to them their information would be made available for targeting ads or collecting information.\u00a0<\/p>\n McCourt likens much of the work he is doing to RCN<\/a>, a telecommunications company started by his brother David McCourt<\/a> in 1993. The company\u2019s big innovation at the time, according to McCourt, was to allow people to own their phone number so that it stayed with them when they transferred from one phone company to another. That meant they didn\u2019t have to reach out to all their friends and family with their new contact info. This new interoperability, he says, was key to creating a competitive phone industry that didn\u2019t keep consumers trapped with the same provider because of the inconvenience of having to get a new phone number. McCourt argues the same should apply to the digital world, with online data. Users should be able to take their data with them wherever they go on the internet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPeople had a visceral emotional reaction to owning a phone number, I would think they would certainly have an even stronger reaction to owning their information, data, and social graph online,\u201d McCourt says.\u00a0<\/p>\n To make that happen, McCourt wants to create a new internet protocol<\/a> that would make safeguarding individual privacy a built-in feature of the new internet. Just as earlier internet protocols<\/a> like the TCP\/IP that allowed devices to connect to each other; and was then followed by HTTP, which essentially gave everyday users of computers the opportunity to access the internet via a web browser, became the foundations of contemporary online life. Neither of these protocols is owned by a single company, which is why using the internet is generally speaking the same experience across any device and regardless of what website or app someone is using. No one company \u201cowns\u201d the internet\u2014hence the term decentralized<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf we as human beings are the users of the internet,\u201d McCourt says,\u201d and if our relationships, our data, and our information are what creates value, why not create another protocol layer that would actually free up the data, so that it\u2019s not the the property of these big platforms, but rather embedded in the internet itself?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n That 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 big companies, has \u201ca vision for an alternative world, in which that data does exist, but it\u2019s at the beck and call of the user themselves,\u201d he told Time<\/em><\/a> in 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n For McCourt, the solution will require new companies to shape this new digital world he imagines. \u201cWe need to innovate our way out of it, because I don\u2019t believe the government is going to be able to regulate us out of this mess,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead businesses will have to show governments the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat they really need is technology that enables and actualizes those public policy objectives,\u201d MCCourt says. \u201cRather than trying to constrain something that\u2019s doing harm and is out of control, why not just have the tech harmonized with the societal policy objectives?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The European Union has made major progress in passing laws meant to regulate major tech firms. In 2016, the bloc passed the General Data Protection Legislation<\/a>, considered one of the toughest data privacy laws<\/a> in the world. It also passed two new pieces of legislation\u2014the Digital Markets Act<\/a> and the Digital Services Act<\/a>\u2014meant to constrain how much influence the industry\u2019s biggest players could exert on digital marketplaces, like app stores and digital ad exchanges. Project Liberty\u2019s calls for a decentralized internet have a \u201cgreat audience in Europe\u201d because they see the new protocol as consistent with the continent\u2019s public policy goals, McCourt says.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n One thing he will need the government\u2019s help is clawing back personal data from companies that already have it, if one day it\u00a0 does pass a law creating a decentralized internet. \u201cThe problem would be solved moving forward\u2026but if you want your archival data, you should be able to get it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Until then, McCourt keeps banging the drum for what he considers the unfairness of current online life. \u201cWe\u2019re not even citizens in the digital world,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re subjects. We\u2019re just data to these big platforms. It\u2019s very dehumanizing, it\u2019s kind of sucking the life out of us.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nWhat is a decentralized internet?<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Business will lead the way, governments will follow<\/strong><\/h3>\n