Recognizing that the principles of freedom, openness, interoperability, security, and resiliency are not representative of the internet reality, the authors 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 to 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.