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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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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)

Chiranuch Premchaiporn, director of Prachatai website, walks past a portrait of King Bhumibol Adulyadej at the criminal court in Bangkok, Thailand. A Thai court sentenced Chiranuch to an eight-month suspended sentence for failing to act quickly enough to remove Internet posts deemed insluting to Thailand's royalty. Photo: AP

A Thai court has convicted an online editor for hosting posts critical of the revered monarchy on her website, but suspended her jail sentence amid demands to reform the lese majeste law.

Chiranuch Premchaiporn was found guilty yesterday of failing to speedily delete comments by other people deemed insulting to the royal family from her popular news website, Prachatai. The Bangkok court fined her 20,000 baht ($A643).

But Judge Kampol Rungrat, while sentencing Chiranuch to eight months in jail, suspended the sentence for a year, saying that she had co-operated with the court and had "never violated the law herself".

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"The defendant cannot deny responsibility for taking care of content on her website," he said, adding she was initially given a one-year jail term but that this was cut to eight months for her "useful" testimony to the court.

She still faces further charges - at a date to be set - of breaching section 112 of the Thai criminal code which outlaws insults to the royal family and allows for a maximum 15-year sentence for every conviction.

Hers is one of several high-profile cases that have stirred fierce debate in Thailand, where authorities are accused of trampling on free speech by exploiting the strict "lese majeste" law against defaming the royal family.

On Tuesday, a petition signed by almost 27,000 people urging reform was submitted to parliament in the first mass action of its kind.

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Webmaster jailed for not deleting insults

Kerek Wongsa / Reuters

Chiranuch Premchaiporn, a Thai website editor, leaves the Bangkok Criminal Court on May 30, 2012

In a much anticipated ruling that struck a chord of moderation in Thailands contentious battle over free speech, a Thai court on Wednesday convicted an Internet webmaster accused of violating the countrys lse-majestlaws, but suspended her sentence and imposed a small fine. The compromise ruling came as the international media turned its spotlight on Thailand with the arrival of global leaders in Bangkok for a meeting of the World Economic Forum on East Asia.

Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the webmaster of the Prachatai political website, was prosecuted under Thailands harsh lse-majestlaws for failing to delete fast enough comments posted by readers deemed offensive to the countrys constitutional monarchy. Her case had drawn the attention of Thai advocates of free speech and international human-rights groups, who were concerned the law is being used tostifle freedom of expression. The verdict came less than a month after an international outcry over thedeath in prisonof a 61-year-old retired truck driver convicted and sentenced to 20 years for sending text messages that threatened members of the royal family.

(MORE: Whats Behind Thailands Lse-Majest Crackdown?)

Chiranuch faced a possible 20 years in prison for 10 offensive comments left by readers. In handing down his verdict, judge Kampol Rungrat said that Chiranuch failed to delete one offensive comment for 20 days, and so sentenced her to one-year in prison, reduced to eight months, but suspended the sentence. He fined her 20,000 baht ($625), which she immediately paid with help from dozens of supporters who had flocked to the court in a show of solidarity.

Chiranuch told reporters the verdict was logical and reasonable, but said it will still have an impact on self-censorship. Sunai Phasuk, the Thailand representative of Human Rights Watch, concurred, saying the judges decision set a troubling and unacceptable precedent in that it requires intermediaries, such as Internet service providers and webmasters, to enforce censorship on behalf of the state. It creates a climate of fear, and damages Thailands attempts to position itself as a hub for information and communications technology in the region, he said.

(MORE: Thailand: Webmaster Case Tests Limits of Free Speech)

The ruling appears to conform to the ideas of 84-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who in a 2005 address to the nation said the lse-majest laws only brought problems for the monarchy and charges against violators should be dropped and those in prison released. However, since that time, and particularly following a 2006 military coup, the number of lse-majestcases filed has increased sharply, as have the penalties.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has said her government will not change the law. Her position is regarded by many analysts as an attempt to smooth relations with ultraconservative elements in the military and the establishment who have questioned the loyalty to the monarchy of her political party and of her older brother Thaksin Shinawatra, the Prime Minister ousted in the coup. Thaksin lives abroad, having fled a conviction and two-year prison sentence for abuse of power.

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Thai Webmaster Gets Suspended Sentence in Free-Speech Case