Richard A. Clarke and Rob Knake
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and abet cybercrime, rather than entire countries. Governments
that fundamentally accept the idea o an open, tolerant, and demo-
cratic Internet but that struggle to live up to such a vision would
have an incentive to improve their enforcement eorts in order
join the league and secure connectivity for their companies and
citizens. O course, authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and
elsewhere will probably continue to reject that vision. Instead o
begging and pleading with such governments to play nice, from
now on, the United States and its allies should lay down the law:
follow the rules, or get cut o.ENDING THE DREAM OF A BORDERLESS INTERNET
When the Obama administration released its International Strategy
for Cyberspace, in 2011, it envisioned a global Internet that would be
“open, interoperable, secure, and reliable.” At the time, China and
Russia were pressing to enforce their own rules on the Internet. Bei-
jing, for example, wanted any criticism o the Chinese government
that would be illegal inside China to also be prohibited on U.S. web-
sites. Moscow, for its part, disingenuously sought the equivalent o
arms control treaties in cyberspace while simultaneously ramping up
its own oensive cyberattacks. In the long term, China and Russia
would still like to exert inÇuence on the global Internet. But they see
more value in building their closed networks and exploiting the West’s
openness for their own gain.
The Obama strategy warned that “the alternative to global open-
ness and interoperability is a fragmented Internet, where large swaths
o the world’s population would be denied access to sophisticated ap-
plications and rich content because o a few nations’ political inter-
ests.” Despite Washington’s eorts to prevent that outcome, that is
precisely where things stand today. And the Trump administration
has done very little to alter U.S. strategy. President Donald Trump’s
National Cyber Strategy, released in September 2018, called for an
“open, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet”—repeating the
mantra o President Barack Obama’s strategy and merely swapping
the order o the words “secure” and “reliable.”
The Trump strategy expounds on the need to extend Internet free-
dom, which it de¿nes as “the online exercise o human rights and
fundamental freedoms—such as the freedoms o expression, associa-
tion, peaceful assembly, religion or belief, and privacy rights online.”