The internet versus humanity is a story of hacking, political pressure, espionage, and commercial interests taking apart our first-ever general-purpose network that connects somewhere in the region of five billion people and countless IT systems.
One thing that's really come back to bite us hard is that the internet was designed with hardly any security, as CFR points out.
The internet blends control and data transmission planes into a single connection. For ages, everything was sent in cleartext without encryption and authentication, and those data flows between networks were managed by engineers emailing or phoning each other.
Nobody asked how that could possibly go wrong, and we now have a fragile and fragmentable internet that is rife with malware, hackers and countries being able to switch the whole thing off at will.
This is not to say the internet wasn't one of America's best ideas ever. It really was, and the internet is now a massive transnational economy in its own right.
Estimating how many trillions of dollars of value the internet brings is probably impossible, but it grows with each new "host" or computer system connection.
This means larger, powerful nations will seek control over the internet, even if it means just carving out a smaller bit of it like Putin hopes to do in Ukraine. Fragmenting the internet like Russia and China are trying to do is cutting off their noses to spite their faces, but authoritarian regimes like those sorts of gambles.
What's missing from the CFR report is how Big Tech wants to own as much as possible of the incredibly valuable internet, and has launched virtual land grabs already.
One particular bugbear for cloud services providers, in particular, is data sovereignty. That term means certain information that's deemed sensitive mustn't leave a particular country's jurisdiction.
New Zealand, which is mentioned in three places in the report, has agreed to remove tariffs on digital goods, to ensure the free flow of data across borders, and banned localisation requirements for cloud computing and data analysis "motivated by anticompetitive or protectionist purposes."
There are good reasons for keeping data local, because what's fine in one jurisdiction is not in another. Indeed, the CFR suggests that nations should harmonise privacy and other, related laws, if they value free data flows.
Not in all cases though. There's no mention of geoblocking of content at the whim of rights holders and forcibly serving it up from local caches that break the end-to-end principle of the internet. Is it a global internet or not?
Last year, US authorities became alarmed at Google and Facebook joining forces in 2018 in the alleged Jedi Blue deal, a way to corner the internet advertising market even further.
Google appears to have launched Project Nera which would see the creation of a "walled garden" across the open internet, a closed ecosystem that would protect the search giant's margins.
This is why you're asked to sign into Chrome, Google's browser that has embraced and extended the web in a way that Microsoft's Internet Explorer failed to do. It's like Hotel California, you can try to check out, but never actually leave.
"... the modern internet remains a backbone for critical civilian infrastructure around the world. It is the main artery of global digital trade. It has broken barriers for sharing information, supports grassroots organisation and marginalised communities, and can still act as a means of dissent under repressive government regimes," the CFR document reads.
Malicious nation states, cyber criminals, parochial politicians and multinationals without ethics is quite the onslaught against the internet. So much so that it threatens to replace the "is" in the paragraph above with "was".
