Milton Mueller and the Internet Governance Project, whom we interviewed in June, has entered the political arena with a petition against U.S. interference in ICANN. (The illustration chosen has little to do with the subject, it's the cover of an Hour of Slack CD called XXX, from Subgenius.com.)

Mueller and the IGP were moved to act by the government's unilateral decision to shut-down .XXX after it was approved by ICANN. In his note to Dave Farber's list Mueller writes, "IGP urges everyone not to let the
advocates of content regulation be the only voices
heard by the Commerce Department."

Read it carefully.

Then sign it.

This is not about content regulation, as your pastor may claim.

The question here is whether the Internet will be governed lightly, and privately, or through the heavy hand of government.

American rhetoric on its action has been nationalistic, all about preventing unfriendly powers with grabbing control of the Domain Name System. (The IGS addresses it in this PDF file.)

But this is not an issue that can be decided by military or even diplomatic power. You can't force other countries to point to your DNS. Without complete consensus, on which DNS servers point to, and the legitimacy of data in those servers, the entire Internet structure breaks down.

Once the step is taken there is no turning back. (Your pastor will understand the illustration, the Tower of Babel.) If the world community, as a whole, has its servers point to a different DNS, maintained by the ITU, it's very possible the U.S. will be isolated. There will be two Internets -- one for us, and one for the rest of the world.

And it's a short step from there to having every nation maintain its own DNS, to their being no Internet at all.

In other words, even if you want the strictest possible content regulation, sign the petition.

The Internet you save may be your own.