This morning's NYT carried an editorial by Mark A. Shiffrin and Avi Silberschatz concerning a proposal to introduce international regulation into ICANN. An excerpt:

There is a move afoot at the United Nations and in the European Union to get the United States to give up control of the Internet - a medium that America created and on which it now critically relies.

Disingenuously calling for a "model of cooperation" in Internet governance in advance of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Tunisia in November, the European commissioner for information society and media is opening the door to Internet regulation while saying that "we have no intention to regulate the Internet."

This maneuver amounts to a call for the United States to depend on the kindness of strangers in maintaining basic infrastructure that underpins our national security and economy. Moreover, it threatens to whittle away the freedom of the Internet with a series of seemingly minor and well-intentioned compromises that begin with something that sounds as reasonable as a "model of cooperation."

I have heard negative comments about ICANN, but nothing that indicates a sense of basic lack of fairness, only procedural annoyances.

I tend to agree with the writers. It doesn't seem like such a good idea to have the internet administered by an international agency. I like that the American principle of free speech and concept of intellectual property are currently the main influences on content. That we have a somewhat dog-eat-dog approach to commerce and crass tastes some of the time strikes me as a mild negative compared to those two strong positives.

Have I got this wrong? What would the US gain from ceding some control over the internet as it's currently structured to an international agency? Why is this even up for discussion?