I see where you're coming from, but I don't really agree with your conclusions. Yes, authoritarian regimes will keep trying to subvert freedom and abuse friendly initiatives. But the real question for me is whether we need to listen to them or not. Why not just ignore them? Maybe they can get the source for some business system in a successful financial company. But they will most likely never be able to replicate that company, so why bother? Maybe the freedom that an open internet gives is worth the downsides? I mean, it has worked thus far.

Weapon systems and other national security is another thing entirely. Here I'm all for heightened security with the whole shebang: physically separate networks, drives in safes, you name it.

Industrial espionage is a borderline case. Here you might want to heighten security for vulnerable companies, especially the ones working under government contracts. The good news is that these are most likely easily identifiable entities. You could maintain a list of high-profile companies who would have to follow stricter security routines. I'm sure this happens already in the real world, so why not use the same type of policies for internet security?

But I would really like to avoid bringing war mentality onto the open internet. Just like you, I think that the 27-page checklist is completely unrealistic.

> Having citadels of security in a floating maelstrom of unprotected Internet is not security at the national level.

No it's not. But why would you need the national level security? I'm not sure that I'm buying you point about the internet itself being "critical infrastructure". If the army want's to claim the whole internet "just in case", then fine, introduce national borders. But isn't it better if all countries work together to make the internet stronger as a whole, and not abusable (prevent these NTP-based DDos attacks for instance)?

The difference is that I don't think that introducing borders are a good long-term strategy. The example which you bring up about anti-USA propaganda is a good one I think. Because what I see in younger generations is a whole new skillset: the ability to see through propaganda, ads and other manipulative media. Thanks to the internet young people can receive several subjective messages and still form their own opinions. Being on the internet exposes you to trolls, liars, false information, propaganda and phishing attempts every day. And people get better at forming their own opinions.

What I've seen over here in Europe regarding pro- and anti-America propaganda once free information was introduces was the following: First people stopped believing the US hype. The US wasn't such a great place after all. Weaknesses such as poverty and gang violence was exposed. Secondly, anti-american propaganda came in from the east. This was listened to to some extent, but pretty soon it became clear that these guys weren't completely honest themselves. And after 9/11 and the Madrid bombings, I don't think anyone think highly of eastern propaganda anymore. Lastly, more information started to flow in from the "real US". Not sitcoms or fox news, but sites like Reddit and hacker news exposed people to the daily lives of americans. And people started to bond and understand one another. And this is what I think is the power of the internet. If we know each other on the small scale, the large scale fights just won't happen. If the news tells me that Kiev is full of terrorists and war makers, I can just happily ignore that having seen live feeds and talked to the people on chats over the internet. It is worth considering, IMO, just how much this communication is worth. It could be that the Internet is the best enabler of Democratic peace that we've seen this far. Maybe so good that democracy isn't even required for enabling "democratic" peace. And borders could ruin that. For proof, just look at dictatorships. They see this power in social media and are deadly scared of it. They're scrambling for the power to shut it down at will.

> Look around the Internet and all I see is Europeans calling us fat, making fun of how we measure distance, write and speak our dates (and all this despite American coders at MS being careful to add locale and translation support to their software), and more or less begging for us to take any overseas extension we have back to America.

This is just little brother teasing big brother. It's not serious IMO.

>While I will say that I do prefer an international, open network just as you do

Well then, let's think up a strategy which would work without building borders between countries! While isolation is the fastest fix, I think it could be worth it if we could find better ones.