At the same time, while members of Congress and the Obama administration have blasted the notion of centralizing international regulatory oversight, a top State Department official told a House subcommittee that even if the U.N. adopts such a proposal in a treaty to be considered at a meeting later this year, the practical effects on the operations of the Internet domestically would be limited.

"[T]here's no enforcement mechanism associated with this. These are precatory, as many, many other aspects of international law are," Philip Verveer, deputy assistant secretary of state and U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy, told members of the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications and Technology.

"This conference and all of these activities are extraordinarily important in terms of establishing norms, in terms of establishing expectations, in terms of trying to help with respect to both the commercial activities and the free flow of information, but they're very, very different from a law that the Congress for example might adopt that would be subject to all the juridical enforcement mechanisms that are available," Verveer said.

At issue is a 1988 treaty known as the International Telecommunications Regulations (ITR), which established a set of global protocols largely concerning issues surrounding cross-border phone service such as the settlement rates telephone providers pay one another for routing calls.

That treaty, administered by the U.N.'s International Telecommunications Union (ITU), has served the international community fairly well, lawmakers and witnesses at Thursday's hearing generally agreed. But expanding the ITU's authority to set Internet governance policies, as some U.N. member states have advocated, threatens the historically decentralized and multi-stakeholder approach that has seen the technology flourish and could pave the way for greater government censorship of content that authoritarian regimes deem a threat, Verveer and Robert McDowell, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, testified.