The U.N. wants control of the internet

Occasionally I browse through the tech geek websites. Today, I found this interesting piece. Apparently, the U.N. wants to take controls over the interenet currently held by non-profit corporation I-CANN. Here's the lede:

With little fanfare, there is a battle going on for the soul of the Internet. The United Nations and the ITU (International Communications Union) are trying to wrest control of domain names, the DNS and IP addresses from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). This battle manifests itself through the U.N.-created World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) and the ITU-lead Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).

So, you may ask, what does that have to do with any of us?

If the U.N. controlled domain names and IP addresses, the ability of countries to censor the Internet would be greatly enhanced, as well as the ability to tax or impose other regulatory burdens on these resources in order to fund unrelated projects of any kind.

In fact, if the U.N. and the ITU were successful, it is not difficult to envision a Balkanization of the Internet as whole portions of the Internet decide they did not want to rely on the U.N. and the ITU for their single authoritative root. If that Balkanization were to take place, the damage to the global economy would be incalculable.

This is a threat to the internet that really deserves more play than what it is getting.