Here’s how the US plans to avoid a UN vote on the future of the Internet

The latest battle over who should run the Internet will be waged in the South Korean port city of Busan over the next three weeks. For US officials headed to the United Nation's International Telecommunication Union's Plenipotentiary Conference, the goal is simple: prevent a vote.

In short, the State Department's approach is this: Convince the representatives of the other 192 member countries attending the conference that the 150-year-old UN technical body is the wrong forum for existential questions about how the Internet should work. That could buy time to improve the current "multi-stakeholder" model that has been used to govern the Internet's operations for years, and make it better able to handle the knottiest questions, from e-mail spam to government-conducted digital surveillance.