So what went down last night -- and what does it mean for us, the users of (and reliers on) the Internet? Here's a guide.

So what was the treaty?

One of the stated goals of the document was to help nations coordinate efforts to fight against spam -- and to widen their access to the web. But many of the summit's discussions ended up questioning whether countries should have equal rights to the development of the Internet's technical foundations -- an extension of the original, stated purpose of the document.

Why was it deemed necessary?

The age of our current governing treaty, most obviously. The current communications treaty that governs Internet communications was last overhauled 24 years ago, in 1988 -- basically hundreds of years ago, in Internet Time.

Who proposed it?

UN's International Telecommunication Union (ITU) organized the 12-day conference in order to make the changes.

Who refused to sign it?

More than 80 countries -- among them the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

So why didn't they go for it?

Much of it came down to the idea that the content of the Internet, rather than its regulation alone, was at stake in the treaty's language. And some of it had to do, as well, with governance -- in particular, the idea that the U.S. government should get to determine which decide which body should regulate the Internet's address system as a legacy of its funding for ARPANET. (The U.S. says that this structure allows its experts to make "agile, rapid-fire decisions" about the Internet's development, maintaining that any other system might be used for purposes of censorship, interference in the operation of ISPs, and the interruption of U.S.-run operations like Google and Facebook.)

But didn't they know about all that from the beginning?

Yes and no. It seems that many of the aspects of the treaty that proved most objectionable to some delegates weren't introduced until later in the game. And the breaking point, per the BBC, was the addition of text relating to "human rights." A proposal from Russia, China, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, for example, -- one calling for equal rights for all governments to manage "Internet numbering, naming, addressing and identification resources" -- was proposed during the proceedings. And then eventually shelved.

Later, an African bloc of countries began calling for a paragraph to be added to the treaty's preamble that would similarly relate to "human rights." (Proposed language: "These regulations recognize the right of access of member states to international telecommunication services.")

But, I mean, human rights! What's wrong with that?

Again: "human rights." The U.S. and its allies suggested that the proposals weren't about the rights of countries' citizens, but rather the rights of their governments to regulate their use of the Internet. They viewed the Russian/Chinese/Saudi Arabian/African proposals, therefore, as a semi-veiled attempt to extend the treaty's regulations to cover Internet governance and content -- regulation of content being, from an open-web perspective, pretty much the worse thing you can do to the Internet.