[dlitz]

Free-speech issues aside, there's also the question of whether you want the IAB/IESG/IETF engineers to continue define Internet standards, or whether you want a group of telephone monopoly bureaucrats to take it over.

Let's consider some of the protocols that the ITU has produced: OSI, X.500, X.509, GSM, V.92, etc. The one thing that they all have in common is that they're all orders of magnitude more complex and difficult to implement than they need to be. They're often also covered by a ridiculous number of patents.

The ITU organization doesn't seem to be capable of producing anything that doesn't cost billions of dollars to implement. Just from a purely technical standpoint, the ITU's history does not suggest that putting them in charge would be good for interoperability, competition, or technological progress.