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Liberal-democratic nation-states make frequent and explicit reference to five key elements of the global internet in their policy documents and cyber strategies: free, open, interoperable, secure, and resilient, or some combination of those elements. However, there are two fundamental problems with this approach.

The first is that the global internet never has embodied the absolute of any of these principles—and it is unlikely to in the future.

The second is that these five principles are in tension with one another—for instance, considering that complete network openness has some negative effect on network security—but this is not reflected in a vision of the internet where they all exist in harmony.

Recognizing that the principles of freedom, openness, interoperability, security, and resiliency are not representative of the internet reality, we have developed an analytical framework for comparing the idealized version of the internet—as imagined by liberal-democratic policymakers—with the internet reality. Within this document itself, the framework allows us begin to identify the current divergence from the idealized version of the global internet and thus identify gaps, pitfalls, and tensions in the liberal-democratic policy community’s approach to the internet. Outside the scope of this document and going forward into future work, this framework enables anyone to plug in a single nation-state’s internet policies to track divergence from the idealized version and to compare differences between countries. This framework is also an initial version and will be iteratively updated as needed.