What does it take for the wealthy scion of one of America’s largest business families to launch a movement in his later years to overhaul the basic infrastructure of the entire Internet? What even exorbitant wealth can’t protect someone from: How mean people can be on the internet.
During their messy, public divorce that was eventually settled in 2011, then-Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt Jr. received a lot of backlash online from the team’s fans. The attention he expected, however, was not harsh.
“Of course, it comes with territory,” McCourt says. luck In an interview. “Even if you own a great franchise like the Dodgers in a big media market like Los Angeles, you’re going to get divorced. There’s going to be a lot of noise, you get that.”
But this was 2010-2011, the birth of the social media era.
“At the time, Facebook was six or seven years old and smartphones were ubiquitous,” he recalls. “I saw how social media became a weapon of character assassination. People who didn’t necessarily have good intentions could say whatever they wanted, and there was no way to protect themselves. ”
A decade after that “very difficult time,” McCourt founded Project Liberty, an advocacy group dedicated to reforming the internet and breaking the power of Big Tech companies. For McCourt, one of the major problems plaguing his users of the Internet is that a select few companies (he names Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon, among others) have a huge amount of information about their users. We are collecting a huge amount of data. These companies, and many others from tax offices to car manufacturers, collect everything from who your closest friends are to where you went that day and how you were feeling. . They often use these vast amounts of data to make predictions about people’s lives and future behavior with near-clairvoyant accuracy.
Amazon, Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet did not respond to requests for comment.
The idea that the extraordinary power of certain technology companies has brought about a new world order is written about by intellectuals and technologists around the world. Commentators have invented new terms such as surveillance capitalism (a term coined by former Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff) and techno-feudalism, a term coined by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, as the aggregation of digital data It represents a world that is fused with real-world surveillance. The information collected enriches a select few companies and individuals.
The terminology may differ, but the core idea is that these companies wield enormous power. In some cases, it is equivalent to the government. A centrist version of this story comes from tech blogger Ben Thompson, who wrote in a recent post in the Stratechery Newsletter: Defined by an American technology company. ”
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.” Essentially, the idea is that the companies that dominate the Internet, such as Google for search, Amazon for shopping, and Meta for social connections, will be forced to give up their monopoly on data collection. McCourt is now one of the newest thinkers to comment on the state of the digital world.
For McCourt, our online existence, consumed by algorithms, is not just a collection of data points, but a matter of humanity. “All this information about us is our living archive, who we are in the digital age,” he says.
According to McCourt, the digital talent that makes up a large part of our lives even offline belongs to big tech companies. “If I say, ‘Please describe yourself,’ you’ll list a bunch of attributes,” he says. “Well, those and tens of thousands of other things are all mapped by these big platforms. I mean, they own you. They own me. And that needs to be corrected.”
Mr. Varoufakis, Mr. McCourt, and their ilk believe that tech companies maintain their power by being black boxes that are inaccessible to ordinary online users.
“It’s very controlling and manipulative,” McCourt says. “I would say that is completely at odds with the ideals of democracy. America’s secret sauce is not centralization, dictatorial rule, and 24/7 surveillance. It is individual freedom, choice, It’s about autonomy.”
What’s worse, McCourt says, is that they sell that data to advertisers for huge sums of money. In 2023, Meta earned $131.9 billion in ad sales, while Alphabet made $65.5 billion in ad sales in the fourth quarter of 2023 alone.
“Everything we do in our digital lives is being monitored and mapped to an enormous extent,” McCourt says. “That’s the holy grail of the commercial internet right now. It has all the information about us so it can sell us things, tell us what to read, how to think, how to act. Because these algorithms know more about us than we know.”
McCourt sees a huge dissonance in the fact that while humans create data, companies own it. Instead, we want users to own their data and be able to opt-in to selling it to advertisers if they wish. According to his recently released book, certain products may be useful if they happen to be on the market. Our Biggest Battle: Reclaiming Freedom, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital AgeCo-authored with Michael Casey, Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk.
“We have the data, and the companies, charities, and other organizations that want to use it should be able to offer us something in return,” McCourt and Casey write.
What is a decentralized internet?
McCourt said everyday netizens are making a terrible deal by trading all of their privacy for free apps and online services. That’s a deal they wouldn’t accept in the real world. In exchange for the company offering you a free stamp for life, read your mailing, “Install cameras in every room of your home to monitor you 24/7” and “If you demand that we profit from every relationship, every thought, every emotion of yours, we say, ‘You’re crazy,'” McCourt says.
Essentially, McCourt questions the adage that governs much of online life: If it’s free, you’re a commodity.
To reduce that risk, he argues, people should be able to own their data. McCourt envisions a new Internet in which users would set their own terms of use, and if companies agreed to them, their information would be used for targeted advertising and information collection.
McCourt likens much of the work he does to RCN, the telecommunications company founded in 1993 by his brother David McCourt. McCourt said the company’s big innovation at the time was allowing people to own their own phone numbers and keep them forever. This happens when you switch from one phone company to another. This meant I didn’t have to send out new contact information to all my friends and family. This new interoperability, he says, was key to creating a competitive phone industry where consumers weren’t locked into the same provider due to the inconvenience of having to get a new phone number. . McCourt argues that the same should be true in the digital world with online data. Users need to be able to take their data with them wherever they go on the Internet.
“People had a visceral emotional response to owning their phone number, but I think they’ll definitely have an even stronger response to owning their information, their data, their social graph online.” says McCourt.
To do that, McCourt wants to create a new Internet protocol that makes protecting individual privacy a built-in feature of the new Internet. Early Internet protocols such as TCP/IP allowed devices to interconnect. This was followed by HTTP, which basically provided the everyday computer user with the opportunity to access the Internet through his web browser and became the basis of modern online life. Neither of these protocols are owned by a single company, so using the Internet generally provides the same experience on any device, no matter which website or app you’re using. It can be obtained. No one company “owns” the Internet, hence the term decentralized.
“If we humans are users of the Internet,” McCourt says, “we’re all users of the Internet.” And if our relationships, data, and information are what creates value, why not create another protocol layer that actually liberates the data? Is it not the property of these big 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 criticizes the concentration of data in the hands of large corporations, saying, “I have a vision of an alternative world where data does exist, but it depends on the will of the users themselves.” Told. time In 2019.
Business leads, government follows.
For McCourt, this solution will require new companies to shape this new digital world he envisions. “We have to innovate how we get out of this mess, because I don’t think the government can regulate us and get us out of this mess,” he says.
Instead, companies will have to show the government the way.
“What they really need is technology that enables and enables public policy goals,” MCCourt said. “Instead of trying to limit something that is causing harm and getting out of control, why not align technology with social policy goals?”
The European Union has made significant progress in passing legislation aimed at regulating big technology companies. In 2016, the bloc passed the General Data Protection Act, which is considered one of the strictest data privacy laws in the world. It also passed two new laws, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, aimed at limiting the influence of the industry’s biggest companies on digital markets such as app stores and digital ad exchanges. Project Liberty’s call for a decentralized internet has a “huge audience in Europe,” McCourt said, because they see the new protocols as consistent with the continent’s public policy goals.
One thing he’ll need the government’s help with is getting personal data back from the companies that already hold it, should legislation someday be passed creating a decentralized internet. “The problem will be resolved in the future…but if you want archival data, you should be able to get it.”
Until then, McCourt will continue to call out the unfairness of today’s online life. “We’re not even residents of a digital world,” he says. “We’re subjects. We’re just data to these big platforms. It’s so dehumanizing, it’s like sucking the life out of us.”
