Some of the world's most authoritarian regimes introduced a new proposal at the World Conference on International Telecommunications on Friday that could dramatically extend the jurisdiction of the International Telecommunication Union over the Internet.

In a Friday night email to Ars Technica, a spokeswoman for the American delegation portrayed the introduction of the new proposal by the United Arab Emirites partway through a key Friday negotiating session as a surprise—and an unwelcome one at that. Negotiators were irritated that they had not been furnished with copies of the proposal before it was formally introduced to the conference.

A copy of the proposal was released by the website WCITLeaks on Saturday morning. It is labeled as a proposal made by Russia, the UAE, China, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Sudan, and Egypt (thoughat least one Twitter user denies that Egypt supports the document).

The ITU regulations were last revised in 1988, so this will be the first time ITU rules formally apply to the Internet. The United States has been pushing to limit ITU regulations to large telecommunications incumbents like AT&T and British Telecom. In contrast, the new UAE proposal would bring a broad range of entities, including website operators like Google and Facebook, under the jurisdiction of ITU regulations.

The new proposal specifies that "member states have the right to manage all naming, numbering, addressing and identification resources used for international telecommunications/ICT services within their territories." This seems to be a challenge to the authority of ICANN and IANA, the quasi-private organizations that currently oversee the allocation of domain names and