American billionaire and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, Frank McCourt, announced on Wednesday (May 15th) that his organization, “Project Liberty,” is forming a consortium to bid for the social media platform TikTok.
On April 24th, President Biden signed a law requiring the Chinese company ByteDance, owner of TikTok, to sell the platform by January 19th next year, or face a ban in the United States.
Both the House and Senate in the United States passed the legislation due to concerns that the Chinese Communist Party could potentially access American data or monitor Americans through the TikTok app.
The White House has stated that, for national security reasons, they would like to see an end to Chinese ownership of TikTok, but they do not want to outright ban the platform.
“Project Liberty” is collaborating with Guggenheim Securities, Kirkland & Ellis law firm, technology experts, academia, and other institutions to propose moving TikTok onto a digital open-source protocol.
The organization stated that supporters of the bid include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and David Clark, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
In 2021, “Project Liberty” launched an open-source decentralized social network protocol and established a shared social graph that is not reliant on specific apps or centralized platforms.
The organization encompasses the work of the Liberty Project Institute, has an international network of partners including academic institutions, and a profit-making sector that includes a technology team developing digital infrastructure.