For my ZDNet blog this morning I interviewed Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project asking how the Internet should be governed.

The real problem is that most users, especially most Americans, don't believe it should be governed at all.

But it is governed.

The Internet is governed by the U.S. government, through ICANN, so anything the U.S. wants goes, and everyone else can go scratch. If the U.S. wants to violate the privacy of foreigners it does so. If it wants servers shut down -- even in other countries -- they're shut down. And all the "taxes" earned from site registration goes to those favored by the U.S. security apparatus.

In the 1990s there was a bit of whispering about this. But now those whispers have become a roar, because this government's obsessions with its own security (at the expense of everyone else's) and "intellectual property" (a phrase that does not appear in its Constitution) are becoming too much to bear.

That's why the ITU and the UN are sniffing around the issues involved in taking control of the root DNS away from ICANN. The coup would occur by these groups simply rolling their own, turning them on, and having member states point to them, instead of those offered by ICANN.

At first you wouldn't notice. But very shortly, as ITU and U.S. policies began to diverge there would be two Internets. Americans wouldn't be able to reach ITU pointers not recognized by ICANN roots, and vice versa for everyone else.

In a way it's already happening.

Countries like China routinely violate the end-to-end principle on which the Internet depends. So do companies like Verizon, with ham-handed spam policies that blacklist whole countries.

To prevent this balkanization, in December 2003, Mueller and some other academics launched their Internet Governance Project. The mission was to offer unbiased intelligence on the issues. One of their periodic reports, on how ICANN might be reformed came out in April.

I interviewed Mueller, who works at Syracuse University, because ZDNet had published a piece by Tucows CEO Eliot Noss, a major beneficiary of ICANN largesse, warning of a UN-ITU conspiracy to strip ICANN of its power and impose multi-government censorship and taxation.

“Eliot fears the sky is falling,” Mueller told me. “What we’ve discovered is, by forcing the US government and ICANN to come to terms with the rest of the world about how the Internet is governed, we’ve opened up avenues of reform.”

Mueller’s paper, co-written with Hans Klein of Georgia Tech, described three paths to reform – top-down, bottom-up, and lateral.

Getting other governments involved would mitigate American power, the report said, bottom-up reforms could give users input, and the ITU could force ICANN to compete for users’ allegiance.

Mueller is still chair of the “non-commercial users constituency” within ICANN – universities and public interest groups. “The WSIS process” so criticized by Noss “could be a way of getting governments to agree governments should not be in control.”

Many will consider that wishful thinking. I do.

At their last summit on cyberspace, in 2003, all the talk was about how taxes might be imposed on developed countries and shifted to less-developed ones to "close the digital divide."

Nonsense, as I wrote at the time. Tinhorn dictators wanted slush funds, they wanted the kind of tribute they got for decades from telephone monopolies, and they were going to "invest" it in their own pleasures because most of them are kleptocrats at heart.

The problem is that someone has to run these root servers. The process of running those root servers means setting and enforcing policies. And the rest of the world no longer trusts the U.S. to do that.

It's a shame, but there it is.