Representatives of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the Internet Society and other groups encouraged attendees of a network operators conference to keep an eye on the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), a treaty-writing conference to be held in Dubai in December.

Even if the U.S. opts out of any Internet regulations adopted at the WCIT, many other countries take the ITU's recommendations seriously, said Sally Shipman Wentworth, senior manager of public policy at the Internet Society. "In many developing countries, they take the treaty itself and incorporate it whole cloth into national law," she said. "If you do business in countries that do that ... this will affect the legal and regulatory environment you work in."

Members of the North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) should also look at the , evaluate how the proposals will affect their businesses, and write short papers detailing the potential problems, Wentworth said. Delegates to WCIT need ammunition in their efforts to keep the ITU away from Internet regulation, she said at a NANOG conference in Dallas.

"Take a look at a single proposal and dissect it from where you sit," she told the network engineers. "Analyze it from a real-world example. Put it on a blog, put it in a paper, send it to us. That kind of work is extremely useful and much, much needed."

Observers of the ITU expect that several countries will push for new, international termination fees for the Internet. In traditional telephone services, telecom providers bill each other for carrying each other's traffic, with the carrier where the call originated paying the carrier where the call ended up.During WCIT, Russia, China and other countries may also push for the ITU to take Internet governance away from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and other organizations. Some countries may push for more surveillance of Internet users in the name of fighting spam or fraud, observers have said.