Earlier quoted context omitted.
In retrospect, the old idea that the internet would be above national borders was hilariously naive. It may be a global network, but there’s nothing that says each country can’t exert a lot of control over their little piece of it.
The Network, in all its incarnations, is about communicating. When you suppose that you'll gain some small advantage by refusing to communicate, everybody else keeps their advantage and you lose yours. You're cutting your nose off to spite your face. Sometimes it takes a war to learn this lesson temporarily. The Treaty of Bern is my go-to example. See, after mail ("snail" mail, not email) had been invented countries…
It's frankly a poor analogy, as the treaty of Bern did not enable the masses of the recipient country's children to sit captive for 6 hours every night attached to a glowing box that promoted ideas incompatible with their surrounding culture. The postal system was never used (to my knowledge) to bombard an entire country's citizens with false information about their government during election time, etc. etc.
The Internet is a very different creature to the postal system