Given his now-famous views on the ineptitude of the United Nations, it’s safe to say where John R. Bolton stands on one particular issue facing the global body. No, it’s not Sudan or the Iraq war: It’s the U.N.’s efforts to wrest control of the Internet away from the United States.

This isn’t a matter of war, oil or letting people live freely. But it is about global economic growth, national sovereignty and power in the information age. Whoever controls decisions on how Internet traffic gets routed can wield vast economic and political influence.

The Web may appear to flourish on its own, but it’s actually governed by strict routing rules. Each user needs a unique Internet address, called an IP address. And all Web sites belong to groups, called domains (.com, .net, etc.) that need managing. The United States, which developed the Internet, has had ultimate control over Web traffic coordination, but it vowed in 1998 to cede the job to international oversight. Now other nations are increasingly concerned the United States is backing away from its promise.

Conversely, U.S. officials, along with telecom and media companies, fear the Internet will be in danger if some U.N. committee gets control and botches the job — say, by imposing geographic borders on the Web until it’s a tangled clump of nation-sites that cannot operate smoothly together.

The shooting started June 30, when the Commerce Department announced the United States would “maintain its historic role” in authorizing changes to the Internet’s domain name system. That statement is widely viewed as a step back from a 1998 Commerce policy paper, which said the United States would eventually internationalize and privatize the newly created Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. Though ICANN today strives to act as an international body for coordinating domain names and addresses, the U.S. government still has the power to negotiate the terms of its contracts with telecom companies that host root domain servers, to veto IP address allocations and to approve changes in the root directory.

The June missive was a pre-emptive strike. A U.N. working group had been crafting its own paper, which it released July 18, positing ways to make “Internet governance” a global affair. That phrase includes not only domain and address administration, but also spam control, privacy, intellectual property and a host of related Web issues.

The 40 members that took part in the working group include such U.S. allies as England and Canada, but also nations with less of a track record on freedom of information, including China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The United States sat it out, because U.S. officials didn’t want to be in the position of endorsing any outcome.

The working group couldn’t decide on a single model for Internet governance, so it proposed four, each of which would essentially transfer control to some sort of U.N. council. But all parties did agree on this statement: “No single Government should have a pre-eminent role in relation to international Internet governance.”

The United Nations plans a November meeting in Tunisia to discuss the report. ICANN’s duties are set to expire in September 2006.

ICANN may have started as merely a technical administrative body, but today its power is akin to owning decisions about the world’s telephone numbering system or radio spectrum allocations.

Developing countries, for example, say ICANN favors large nations and big corporations when it doles out IP addresses. Yet giving U.N. members control could have worse outcomes: Some regimes might win the power to allocate addresses within their borders — and then stifle competition or free speech by handing them only to state-run phone systems or denying them to political opponents.

South Korea, for example, wants control over IP addresses, critics say, because KTA, the dominant telecom company, wants to protect its broadband infrastructure from competing Internet providers.

You don’t have to be John Bolton to be skeptical about the U.N.’s ability to keep rogue nations from destroying the borderless world of Internet communications. On the other hand, the Web now has more than a billion users — and the United States makes up a relatively small share. ICANN is increasingly clashing with nations that complain, as China does, that the Web operates based on English language characters, or that the U.S.-controlled ICANN chose to designate a new “.xxx” domain for pornographic sites.

Indeed, there are risks to the United States holding on too tightly. “If oversight . . . is seen as a U.S. strategic asset rather than as a globally shared infrastructure, the risks of deliberate disruption and politicization of the Internet’s central coordinating operations can only increase,” concludes a July 28 paper by the Internet Governance Project, a nonprofit academic group .

In other words, if Bolton stridently insists that only the United States — and never the United Nations — will ever govern the Internet, these early years of ICANN could be reduced to merely a naive period of global cooperation. And then the worldwide part of the World Wide Web, such as it is, would be history.

Mike Mills is CQ’s executive editor for electronic publishing. Next week’s CQ Roundtable: Courts & the Law, by Kenneth Jost.