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It possibly fits within the portfolio of the ITU (although I guess the UN is intergovernmental, rather than a government).

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That has been proposed for as long as I can remember. The result would be that dictatorships and authoritarian governments control the internet, because they make up the majority in the ITU. I don't think we want that.

Can you explain this a bit more? Afaik the ITU does a good if boring job. I can phone about anybody in the world. The system works.

Now ICANN? They seem a bad choice, as this story demonstrates. Tolerable as long as the internet wasnt very important, but today, a UN international body seems the obvious choice.

They would only control the assignment of TLDs, whereas all the stuff that's actually interesting from a censorship perspective happens on much lower levels than that.

For example, ITU also controls country code assignment for phone numbers. Does that translate to any meaningful capacity to censor? So far as I know, the only practical restriction that comes out of it is that unrecognized states don't get one assigned, but that's also generally true with TLDs.

No, Hell no. The UN should not be involved in the Running of the Internet. That would be worse than ICANN by far

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