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By Nina Easton, senior editor-at-large

FORTUNE -- The bureaucrats at the United Nations, prodded by developing countries and exemplars of democracy like Russia and China, have hit on an enticing new way to control global communication and commerce: They want to regulate the Internet.

It's one of those rare issues in this heated campaign season that is uniting the political left, right, and middle in Washington. Business leaders beyond Silicon Valley would be smart to sit up and take notice, too -- and fast. American opponents are being seriously outpaced by U.N. plans to tax and regulate that are already grinding forward in advance of a December treaty negotiation in Dubai.

"Having the U.N. or any international community regulate the Internet only means you're going to have the lowest common denominator of 193 countries," notes Richard Grenell, who served as spokesman and adviser to four U.S. ambassadors to the U.N. between 2001 and 2009.

That the U.N. too often acts as a repository of the world's lowest common denominator is a familiar complaint from American conservatives. Witness blocked attempts to take action against bad actors like Syria. Now those fears are being realized over the Internet, which has a nasty habit of spreading free speech -- and with it, discontent and revolt.

MORE:The end of an era on Sand Hill?

The conduit is a little known U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, which coordinates cross-border issues such asradio spectrum and satellite orbits. At the December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai (bureaucratically titled the WCIT-12) the ITU will consider expanding its purview to the Internet. That may be six months away -- but ITU working groups are already laying the groundwork.

Behind the effort are efficient censor machines like China, and autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin, who last year declared his desire to establish "international control" of the Internet. These are "not exactly bastions of Internet freedom," as Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio put it during a hearing last month. "Any place that bans certain terms from search should not be a leader in an international Internet regulatory framework."

The House Communications and Technology subcommittee convenes its own hearing Thursday.

Also pushing for international controls are developing countries hungry not only for political control, but also for new sources of revenue. (Allowing foreign phone companies to collect fees on international traffic is one proposal under discussion.) Grenell, who saw the regulatory effort spring up from the beginning a decade ago, notes that developing countries at the U.N. "get excited about taking up global issues that will give them more control and influence over commerce, that require businesses to seek their input and approval."

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U.N.'s push to regulate the Internet

Bob Van Voris / Bloomberg

Paul Ceglia claims that he has a 2003 contract that makes him a partner in Facebook.

The number of Internet connections will reach 18.9 billion by 2016, up from 10.3 billion in 2011, driven by a proliferation of smart phones, tablets and other handheld devices, according to an annual survey by Cisco Systems.

The number of connections works out to almost 2.5 for each person on Earth in 2016. India is expected to have the fastest rate of Internet traffic growth, followed by Brazil and South Africa, the survey found.

"More and more mobile devices are coming on the network that are causing this growth," said Doug Webster, a vice president for San Jose's Cisco who discussed the report at a news briefing Wednesday in Washington.

In 2016, the volume of Internet traffic is expected to be measured for the first time in zettabytes - or 1 trillion gigabytes, Webster said.

Traffic that year is expected to reach 1.3 zettabytes, or 110 exabytes per month, almost a fourfold increase from about 31 exabytes per month in 2011, the survey found.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is set for questioning by the Federal Trade Commission as the agency speeds up its antitrust probe of the world's most popular search engine, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Schmidt's deposition is scheduled to take place as soon as next week, one of the people said. FTC investigators are also interviewing two lower-level Google officials this week, another of the people said. The three people declined to be identified because they weren't authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

A law firm is seeking to withdraw from a New York man's lawsuit claiming half the Facebook holdings of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, according to Dean Boland, another of the man's lawyers.

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Internet connections to reach 19 billion by 2016

By Nina Easton, senior editor-at-large

FORTUNE -- The bureaucrats at the United Nations, prodded by developing countries and exemplars of democracy like Russia and China, have hit on an enticing new way to control global communication and commerce: They want to regulate the Internet.

It's one of those rare issues in this heated campaign season that is uniting the political left, right, and middle in Washington. Business leaders beyond Silicon Valley would be smart to sit up and take notice, too -- and fast. American opponents are being seriously outpaced by U.N. plans to tax and regulate that are already grinding forward in advance of a December treaty negotiation in Dubai.

"Having the U.N. or any international community regulate the Internet only means you're going to have the lowest common denominator of 193 countries," notes Richard Grenell, who served as spokesman and adviser to four U.S. ambassadors to the U.N. between 2001 and 2009.

That the U.N. too often acts as a repository of the world's lowest common denominator is a familiar complaint from American conservatives. Witness blocked attempts to take action against bad actors like Syria. Now those fears are being realized over the Internet, which has a nasty habit of spreading free speech -- and with it, discontent and revolt.

MORE:The end of an era on Sand Hill?

The conduit is a little known U.N. agency called the International Telecommunication Union, which coordinates cross-border issues such asradio spectrum and satellite orbits. At the December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai (bureaucratically titled the WCIT-12) the ITU will consider expanding its purview to the Internet. That may be six months away -- but ITU working groups are already laying the groundwork.

Behind the effort are efficient censor machines like China, and autocrats like Russian President Vladimir Putin, who last year declared his desire to establish "international control" of the Internet. These are "not exactly bastions of Internet freedom," as Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio put it during a hearing last month. "Any place that bans certain terms from search should not be a leader in an international Internet regulatory framework."

The House Communications and Technology subcommittee convenes its own hearing Thursday.

Also pushing for international controls are developing countries hungry not only for political control, but also for new sources of revenue. (Allowing foreign phone companies to collect fees on international traffic is one proposal under discussion.) Grenell, who saw the regulatory effort spring up from the beginning a decade ago, notes that developing countries at the U.N. "get excited about taking up global issues that will give them more control and influence over commerce, that require businesses to seek their input and approval."

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Where's the outcry on the U.N. push to regulate the Internet?

U.S. officials and high-tech business giants have launched an assault against what they view as a massive threat to the Internet and to Silicon Valleys bottom lines: foreign governments.

In a congressional hearing Thursday, they will warn lawmakers of a growing movement led by China, Russia and some Arab states to hand more control of the Web to the United Nations and place rules on the Internet that the U.S. companies say would empower governments to clamp down on civil rights and free speech.

That could mean the Web might look drastically different in other countries than it does in the United States, opponents of the proposals say. An Internet user in Uzbekistan could be more easily tracked by government officials and might get access to only a portion of the Google search results seen in the United States, for example.

In a rare coordinated effort to knock down the proposals, Google, Microsoft, Verizon and Cisco also warn of financial risks to their businesses if new rules are adopted. They say some nations may push forlaws on Internet firms that could lead to tariffs on Internet service providers such as Verizon, or even Web firms such as Facebook that enable people to communicate over the Internet.

The threats are real and not imagined, although they admittedly sound like works of fiction at times, said Robert McDowell, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission.

The U.S. companies protests come ahead of a key December meeting in Dubai, where United Nations members will reconsider a 1988 communications treaty. Several foreign governments have argued that the treaty needs to be updated, given the growing influence of Internet communications.

The number of Web users is expected to grow from 2.3billion today to 3.4billion in four years, according to a new report by Cisco. Facebook and Twitter proved to be vital for revolutionaries during the Arab Spring protests last year. And in many developing countries, the only outlet to the outside world is what people read online.

So much has changed since the 1988 revisions, so the global policy and regulatory framework needs to be updated, Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, the U.N.s telecom authority, said in a speech this month.

Many nations want more say over the shape of the Web. The Internet has been heavily influenced by U.S. firms and American academics who set the standards, they argue. China, in particular, has been critical of the United States efforts to encourage open Web policies around the world.

The ITU has criticized the U.S. outcry against the proposals by foreign governments. We are baffled. There is so much misinformation on this, said Alexander Ntoko, head of corporate strategy for the ITU. He said the Americans are exaggerating how much the U.N. could shape the Web.

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U.S. tech companies warn of threat to Internet from foreign governments

Global Internet traffic is expected to increase threefold over the next five years.

This morning Cisco released its annual Visual Networking Index, the report that tracks Internet traffic patterns from around the world. The document-meets-data-trove forecasts, among other things, broadband usage for two and three and four years from now.

Below are Cisco's projections for Internet traffic over the next four years. One key milestone it encompasses: Cisco is predicting that global IP traffic will surpass 1.3 zettabytes in size by 2016. That's huge in every sense:A zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes, or a sextillion bytes. Which is in turn equal tomany, many bytes.(And 1.3 zettabytes is a per year stat: In terms of monthly traffic, citizens of the world of 2016 can expect traffic of 109.5 exabytes a month.)

Also notable is Cisco's projection that global IP traffic will increase threefold over the next five years. (That's after an eightfold increase over the past five years alone.) Particularly in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, traffic growth will explode. And that, of course, will have social and economic and geopolitical ramifications -- some of which we can forecast, and others of which we can't yet imagine.

But the biggest story here, as it increasingly will be, is mobile. Mobile traffic will rise steadily and explosively over the next four years, Cisco projects. While the compound annual growth rates (CAGR) for fixed Internet and managed IP hover at 28 percent and 21 percent, respectively ... Cisco expects that the CAGR for mobile data will be a whopping 78 percent by 2016. The Internet, increasingly, will be portable.

A few caveats, however. Last year's VNI report put mobile at a 92 percent CAGR by 2015 -- so the new projected growth rates are conservative by comparison. And mobile's story is one of relative growth rather than absolute penetration: Mobile, of course, won't have overtaken its counterpart connections by 2016 -- far from it. Mobile is the blue line in the graph above; for all its growth, its penetration is still tiny compared to non-mobile Internet access. The trend lines past 2016 hint at mobile overtaking managed IP; for now, though -- and for the next four years -- it will likely remain the scrappy upstart of Internet connectivity.

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The Future Growth of the Internet, in One Chart (and One Graph)