Frank McCourt on the value of personal data at Govern or be Governed

Frank McCourt is a real estate magnate turned sports team owner, and now a digital freedom advocate. In 2021, he founded Project Liberty, an initiative to rethink social media as a public good. In 2024, he published a book on that topic, Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital Age.

(I’m transcribing what McCourt is saying, to the best of my abilities. I don’t endorse anything specific he’s saying here.)

Asked why he’s interested in digital media, McCourt refers to his children – he’s got eight, four older, four younger and notes how different it’s been raising children in the current digital age. He refers to his family background in building highways as connecting him to building future internet infrastructure.

McCourt references the coverage of his divorce in LA media (and controversy over his ownership of the LA Dodgers) as alerting him to the power of the contemporary internet. He saw the internet of that time as becoming “performance based”, focused on likes and clicks. His analogy for his experience was trying to put out a house fire with a small garden hose while thousands of people poured gasoline on it. His response to being dragged in social media was to talk to policymakers about the incentives and structures of social media. After founding a public policy school at Georgetown, he decided that we needed technological interventions as well. His goal is building a technology stack not centered on surveillance, but on public values.

His “aha moment” came from bringing “brilliant technologists” together and inviting them to think what an alternative could be. The internet was just fine, he tells us, until some people figured out that “data was gold” and that they needed to extract as much data as possible. “In social, shopping or search, it was our personal information that gave us incredible insight about us.” These companies, he asserts, know us better than we know ourselves. So why not a protocol that gives us ownership of our personal data?

He references Buckminster Fuller to suggest we not try to fix existing social media, but create a new technology from the ground up to work in a different paradigm. “And now there are 14 million people using it, so there is no question it can scale.” (He acknowledges that in an internet that connects multiple billions of people, that’s pretty small.)

“It’s fine to have GDPR, DSA and so”, but why not have technology that bakes those priorities into the technology, he asks? He’s thoughtful in noting that there are other people in the room building alternative technologies, and he doesn’t assert that he’s got the silver bullet. The problems are well defined, he argues, but we now need to pivot to the solutions. (The moderator references Gander, a Canadian social network designed around an alternate set of values.)

Asked about his failed bid for TikTok, McCourt says that TikTok was never the goal, just an opportunity – bringing a non-surveillant stack to 184m TikTok users (presumably just the US users?) would create momentum for his alternative architecture. McCourt argues that your data is worth something individually, not just in aggregate – the valuation of tech companies proves data is valuable: why aren’t we getting something from it?

Frank McCourt at Govern or Be Governed

Raising $20b suggests that there are people excited by his vision, McCourt says. He notes that the solution on the table from the Trump administration doesn’t comply with US law, and suggests that Chinese technology can influence the opinions of 184 million Americans.

“It’s really hard to change 30 years of entrenched technology.” When tech changes is when space opens and new designs can take hold. We’ve had a certain version of the internet, now a highly centralized, app centric internet – the shift to an “agentic web” is our moment to make a change. “It’s much easier to change the direction of technology” when tech shifts. But it’s a narrow window, he says, and big tech companies are moving so fast because they see this moment as threatening.

“Don’t think of AI and social differently. What was our social graph and personal information exploited in Web2.0. The version in AI will be our AI context, the context we share with an LLM.” (I agree with him on the context point, but will make my case that AI is far more centralizing than social media in my remarks later today.)

“That information should be ours, not the company’s. Just like our social graph information should be ours.” We should be able to move our context from one platform to another.

Asked whether there are enough people who believe in alternatives visions of the internet, McCourt argues that another internet has been built. He references his history helping build RCN, a telco that challenged existing telcos shifting from copper to fiber. By seeing that shift, he argues, he was able to capitalize on the rise of home internet. When RCN was taking off, he notes that people didn’t want to adopt the service because they couldn’t take their phone numbers with themL – why aren’t people up in arms about the need to migrate their social graphs?

Asked what people in this room – policy officials, philanthropic organizations, activists – can do, McCourt asks us to imagine a different paradigm. “It’s just technology, it works a certain way because it’s been designed to work that way. It can work in an entirely different way.” Project Liberty has three different tracks: technology, policy and coalition building. “We just need people to understand what’s at stake and demand it.”

McCourt’s hopeful vision is that our data is worth huge amounts of money: transferring ownership from the tech companies to individuals “could be the largest redistribution of wealth in history, without taxes.” Big Tech doesn’t want us to understand that our data is us, which allows us to be manipulated and challenges our free will. “Our data is our personhood, our digital DNA.” It’s a human right “and also a property right: your data is really valuable.”

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