Frank McCourt questions the legality of the sale of Tiktok’s US activities to people close to Donald Trump. The owner of Olympique de Marseille, who made his fortune in real estate, also presented himself as a candidate, along with other investors, including Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, but his project was not accepted.
The agreement negotiated by the White House, the details of which are not yet known, provides for the sale of the US subsidiary of the Chinese social network to a group of investors close to Donald Trump, including Larry Ellison (Oracle). The US Congress had ordered ByteDance to cede control of TikTok to the United States, under penalty of ban, for fear of national security.
Frank McCourt told CNN that he had asked lawyers to evaluate the legality of the agreement negotiated by the White House. “I have requested and hired very competent people to analyze the agreement as best as possible, with the information available, because there are still missing elements about its meaning,” declared the American businessman, specifying that “it was too early” to say whether he will challenge the legality of the text in court.
The owner of OM carried out a project, called Project Libertad, which he described as “an offer from the people.” Specifically, he promised to make TikTok work with a new algorithm, which will allow users to better control how their data is used.
“New Internet Architecture”
The former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team has been protesting for years against the control of technology giants. “The big technology platforms collect and accumulate our data, they hyper- and micro-profile us, and now they are no longer content with selling us advertising, but with manipulating us,” Franck McCourt told CNN.
It suggests a “new Internet architecture”, based on an open source system, a decentralized protocol where users control their own data, regardless of the social networks they use. Frank McCourt is not abandoning this project. The real estate mogul told CNN that he now wants to implement the technology he planned at TikTok through artificial intelligence that would monitor the use of user data.
On September 25, Donald Trump signed an executive order that defines the contours of the sale of American Tiktok activities. He assured that the American version of the platform would be managed by “very sophisticated” investors. as Larry Ellisonat the head of the technology giant Oracle, Michael Dell, founder of the Dell group, and the Media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The White House specified that the social network would work with a copy of the current algorithm, which would be managed by Oracle without the Chinese group Bytedance being able to have access to it. Congress, which feared that Chinese authorities would access American users’ data or modify the algorithm to influence them, adopted a law in 2024 that will force Tiktok to free itself from Bytedanceunder penalty of prohibition.
Source: BFM TV
