Can we regulate or spend our way to Exit? Lessons from Europe, Utah, and Project Liberty

Hi, folks. I originally planned to cover a dozen Exit-related projects in a lighting round this week, but looking into regulation sent me down a deep rabbit hole, so I’ve split things in half in order to give the EU and Frank McCourt their due.

As most of you probably know, the European Union has been on a tear trying to regulate the technology industry.

The 2016 General Data Protection Regulation is mostly famous for bringing the world those ubiquitous cookie warnings we all enjoy so much. It’s less well-known that Article 20 mandates data portability, defined as the right to receive all of your personal data in a machine-readable format, either downloaded, or transmitted directly from one platform to another.

The 2022 Digital Markets Act is another monster regulation that tries to constrain “gatekeepers.” Recital 59 of the preamble mandates data portability, defined as continuous, real-time access to data you provide or generate through their activity, made available through APIs and/or technical standards.

Note that neither regulation requires platforms to import each other’s data (see last week). The EU is assuming access to this data is enough to lead to new use cases and competitors.

For more analysis of European regulations, I recommend this detailed paper by Barbara Lazarotto of Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Obviously, the US has not followed suit, but it’s not for lack of trying. In October 2019, Senators Mark Warner, Josh Hawley, and Richard Blumenthal introduced the bipartisan Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act.

The ACCESS Act would require “large communications providers” (including messaging, media sharing, and social networking) to provide interfaces for users to download their data or transfer it to a competitor in a machine-readable format, similar to the EU regulations. It goes beyond the EU, however, by requiring interoperability in the form of interfaces to allow users of competing providers to communicate with each other.

This would be a huge step forward by making platforms play nice(r) with each other. So, of course, it died in committee. Senator Warner and his co-sponsors reintroduced the bill in July 2023 and May 2025, but it still shows no signs of life, and I couldn’t find any indication that its chances are better this time around.

When the federal government doesn’t act, states can take the lead. In April, Utah passed the Digital Choice Act, which takes effect in July 2026, and requires social media platforms to provide your personal data, specifically including your social graph, defined as your connections with other users, content you’ve created, and your comments on other people’s posts. The download needs to be portable, usable, and able to be transmitted to another platform.

The Utah DCA one-ups the Access act by requiring not just one, but two types of interoperability: a) sharing personal data between social media services, and b) giving third parties notification and access when a user creates or changes content.

This may not mean much — after all, Utah is only ~1% of the US population. But in mid-August, an almost-identical bill was introduced to the New York State Legislature, and there are hopes that other states will pick it up as well. Well-known Internet skeptic Jonathan Haidt wrote in support of the Utah bill, too. Sounds like an organic groundswell of support, right? Well, maybe. Let’s talk about Project Liberty.

Project Liberty is a non-profit founded in 2019 with $100mm donated by billionaire Frank McCourt (not the Irish author) to give people choice, a voice, and an economic stake in their online lives. Project Liberty has been deeply involved in drafting and advancing both the Utah and New York Digital Choice Act.

[Full disclosure - Project Liberty gave the generous gift to Harvard that created the Applied Social Media Lab that I served as founding director of in 2014. I am grateful to them for making the Lab possible. I only met Frank glancingly, but he introduced me to the analogy to mobile phone number portability that I’ve used a lot since.]

Project Liberty’s flagship idea is the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). DSNP brings interoperability to social media by putting your account and social graph onto a blockchain that is out of any one platform’s control. This would mean you own your account in the same irrevocable way someone owns a cryptocurrency, and can bring it to platforms as you choose without being locked in or surrendering your rights.

DSNP is a standard, not a product, so another Project Liberty-affiliated organization called Frequency was formed to actually build a blockchain that implements it. So far, the biggest platform to implement Frequency is a new-ish social network platform called MeWe, which as of 2022 had around 4-5 million active users. That is the same year they announced they would move all of their user accounts to Frequency. This became possible thanks to a $27 million funding round, led by $15 million from McCourt Global, Frank McCourt’s family company.

The positive here is that McCourt has put his money where his mouth is, with a huge investment in defining, implementing, and (where possible) legislating social media interoperability. Since I care deeply about Exit as a way to establish platforms that are authentically responsive and democratic, I have to respect the effort here.

On the other hand, it’s not clear that Exit is a game that can be won with money. Project Liberty has spent six years and $115 million to get those 4 or 5 million active MeWe users onto DSNP, plus passing one state law that hasn’t taken effect yet. Meta, on the other hand, needed only two years to launch Threads and get it to over 400 million active users as of August 2025.

Meta has more than enough resources to win a financial war a thousand times over. McCourt’s net worth according to Forbes is $1.4 billion. Meta just reported that they have over $44 billion in the bank, and are earning billions more every quarter.

The good news is that there is another way. Assembling the ASML team taught me that there is a passionate community out there who are getting real value from Exit and will work hard to make it easier and more prevalent for everyone. As someone pointed out to me, this is the flip side of big platforms wanting their most demanding users to Exit (see two weeks ago). If enough of them go, they can band together and build something that could bring millions of people with them.

I’ll tell you more about some of these projects next week.

This also isn’t the full story on regulation. For more coverage of government action on data portability around the world, the Data Transfer Initiative puts out a comprehensive update twice a year. They mention a dozen countries making moves.

Ideas? Feedback? Criticism? I want to hear it, because I am sure that I am going to get a lot of things wrong along the way. I will share what I learn with the community as we go. Reach out any time at [email protected].