The US House of Representatives has voted unanimously against a UN takeover of Internet governance (control of technical specifications, the Domain Name System etc). Currently these are controlled by non-profit organisations, which officially fall under the remit of the US Department of Commerce, however they operate at arms length from the US government. This is described as a "multi-stakeholder" approach, and ensures that power remains in the hands of the non-profit organisations rather than governments.

However, several countries including Russia and China have backed a proposal that the UN's International Telecommunications Union (ITU) should have control over data privacy, cybersecurity, DNS and technical standards. This would mean that UN members would get a vote on how these things are defined. One of the founders of the Internet, Vint Cerf (who now works at Google) explained “Last June, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin stated the goal of Russia and its allies as ‘establishing international control over the Internet’ through the I.T.U. And in September 2011, China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan submitted a proposal for an “International Code of Conduct for Information Security’ to the U.N. General Assembly, with the goal of establishing government-led ‘international norms and rules standardising the behaviour of countries concerning information and cyberspace.’”

The Obama administration has already made clear that they are opposed to this, and Google have applauded the vote from the House of Representatives in a blog post.

Sources:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19106420
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/03/bey...rnet-takeover/
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.c...esolution.html
http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-va...unanimous-vote

My opinion on this is that UN member states having a say in the regulation of the internet would be a disaster. We already know what the likes of Russia, China, and some of the Middle Eastern governments think about web freedom, and frankly the less involvement they have the better. What do you guys think?