On Thursday morning, Vint Cerf, the most famous member of the “fathers of the Internet” club (whose secret greeting is the TCP 3-Way handshake) testified before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee. He’s leading the charge of tech luminaries and leaders of industry that are calling for the Internet to be kept just the way it is, Ryan Gosling memes and all.

Nearly all Western countries and tech companies are opposed to the pending plan that is set to be heard at the December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai (or if you prefer, its catchier title: WCIT-12), where all 193 member nations are set to convene.

Many larger nations, including China, Russia, India, and others, are in favor of a new plan that would shift control of the Internet away from the International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based nonprofit, and more to the ITU. Cerf, and others, fear that this would lead to an Internet that could have stronger national boundaries, including IP address registration, and possible new fees for international IP traffic.

Many proponents are not exactly bastions of Internet freedom. In the fall, Russia and China and other regional players, including Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, pushed their respective visions at the United Nations.

The week before the London Cyber Conference in November 2011, the Russian Embassy in London published on its website a "Concept of a Convention on International Information Security," which, in the unlikely scenario that world powers could agree on its principles, would assure that individual countries would assume their own sovereign roles with respect to cyberspace policy in their own countries.

"Practicing power politics in cyberspace in the name of cyber-freedom is untenable," said Wang Qun, China's ambassador for disarmament affairs, in a speech in New York last October.

But Vint Cerf, as a representative of Google and other major US Internet companies, isn’t standing for it.

“But if there’s one thing that we should not do, it is to centralize decision-making power,” Cerf told the committee on Thursday.

“The greatest strength of the current system of Internet governance is its meritocratic democracy. Anyone who cares can voice ideas and opinions, but the ultimate decisions are governed by broad consensus. It might not always be the most convenient of systems, but it’s the fairest, safest, and historically most effective way to ensure that good ideas win out and bad ideas die.”