The writing was on the wall when the board decided they weren't getting what they wanted from the at-large constituency & direct elections and shut them down, in doing so completely blowing off the Memorandum of Understanding. It's a bit surprising that it's taken so long to hit .org directly, it's a really obvious target if you want to find ways to turn an ICANN position into cash.

Full disclosure, I was one of those at-large members and they made it very clear that we weren't being good little peons.

To me, this seems like a good case for government intervention. Domain names are critical infrastructure at this point.

Which government? Critical to whom?

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

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.

Each one for its ccTLD. I don't think anything can be done about generic TLD without a democratic world government.

All of them? (for both questions) :)