[Martin Tell]

The matter is of course more complicated than this article makes out. The International Telecommunication (singular, not "Telecommunications" as in the article) has had authority over telephone numbers and routing for well over 100 years. As such they are well experienced and positioned to help with Internet addressing and routing matters. And while the ITU is nominally a UN agency, it predates the UN and UN politics have little influence on it.

I've been involved with two ITU working groups. Yes, the Syrian rep showed up and made anti-US points, but everyone ignored him. I found the ITU staff to be conscientious, technically savvy, and apolitical. All in all I trust the ITU more than ICANN.

[snarks_when_bored]

You may be correct in your assessment of the integrity of the ITU, but would it be able to resist the dictates of the many closed states of the U.N.? I wonder.

[Esther Ruth]

"I found the ITU staff to be conscientious, technically savvy, and apolitical. All in all I trust the ITU more than ICANN."

We cannot even trust our friends and neighbors who we send off to Washington. Someone throws a little money their way and they sell their soul to the highest bidder. We certainly cannot trust this group who we would have even less control of if any.

[Gideon7]

In the late 1980s the ITU tried to replace the Internet TCP/IP communicaton protocol standards with something called OSI. Basically it was an attempt by the national PTT (Postal, Telegraph, and Telephone) monopolies to wrest control of the Internet out of the hands of the US government. The PTT monopolies are especially strong in the 3rd world countries and they dominate the ITU, which sets world telephone standards.

The ITU is a big reason why phone calls to 3rd world countries are so ridiculously expensive. The bureaucracy of the ITU is Kafka-esque: The OSI documents for TP4 and X.25 were written in uncomprehensible Euro-legalese and you had to pay through the nose just to look at them. (This was one reason why OSI failed - TCP/IP was evangelized through the wide distribution of the free source code of BSD Unix; OSI/TP4/X25 had no equivalent.)

If the ITU had taken over the Internet 15-20 years ago with OSI/TP4/X.25, today instead of paying $19.95/month for your megabit DSL you would be paying ten times that amount for your switched X.25/ISDN connection at 64 kbps.

The ITU is the last organization I'd want to see "running" the Internet.

[Publius6961]

How long do you think that rationality will last?

After all, it took a few years for the General Assembly to be run by the muslims and their friends, rendering it less than useless.