Who should govern the Net?

It's no longer merely an academic question. Since 1998, responsibility for overseeing domain names and addresses has rested with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a nonprofit group based in Marina Del Ray, Calif.

ICANN has enjoyed notable successes in the last six years. It has created a way to resolve domain name disputes, formalized some ad hoc arrangements the U.S. government created and approved a handful of top-level domains like .aero and .museum. In between, ICANN has weathered outbreaks of congressional enmity and, occasionally, outright hostility from foreign governments.

But now, the governance structure of the Internet may have reached an inflection point. ICANN is being assailed domestically by VeriSign, which filed a federal lawsuit last month, complaining that it has been repeatedly thwarted in trying to make money off its government-granted right to run the master .com and .net database. Internationally, ICANN is fending off a power grab from the United Nations, which has wanted more involvement with the Internet, ever since one of its agencies in 1999 proposed a tax of 1 cent per every 100 e-mail messages.