When David Gross heard last month that the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, wanted to lower-case the word Internet as a matter of official policy, he did not know whether to be alarmed or amused.

"We immediately thought, 'Gee, what's up with that?'" Gross, the coordinator for international communications and information policy at the U.S. State Department, said by telephone from Washington last week. "Who made the decision and on what basis? We didn't have a clue if this was something insignificant or significant."

But some others among the 2,100 participants at the union's highest-level strategy meeting, which convened for three weeks in November in Antalya, Turkey, were more certain. They saw the move as the latest in a long-running effort by the organization to control the Internet, this time through a subtle yet symbolic imprint on the most powerful communications and commercial tool of the 21st century.

As the agency puts on the telecommunications industry's biggest gathering, called ITU Telecom World, this week in Hong Kong, its role as an arm of the United Nations - with all of its accompanying privileges, immunities and treaty-making authority - and as a conduit between business and government is part of the subtext.

Within the UN system, the ITU is unique in sharing its membership among nations - now numbering 191 - and companies, 650 of which have a voice in the union. (In Turkey, ITU delegates agreed to study whether to allow "civil society" organizations more flexibility as members in the future as well.)

To some business representatives, Internet advocates and officials of English-speaking governments involved, the case of the small-i "internet" was a fresh scare that Internet-management issues were "back on the table," in the words of one American observer, who asked not to be named because of political sensitivities.

After vigorous discussion and some good-humored hallway exchanges, the delegates decided to leave well enough alone and keep the capital I in Internet.

Other proposals to change the name of the ITU to include the words "Internet" or "Information Society" were shelved for further study.

Even so, by the time the union's quadrennial strategy session concluded in Turkey on Nov. 24, a rapprochement of sorts had taken hold, with a consensus that the ITU should participate in Internet policy issues, even lead them, but not take them over.

"I wouldn't want to see the ITU trying to take over Internet governance," Hamadoun Touré of Mali, who was elected the union's highest-ranking official at the plenipotentiary conference in Antalya, said during his introductory press conference. "I make that very clear."

But broader and underlying tensions about the direction of the organization, which has its roots in the era of the telegraph, have plagued it since the Internet became the most important "content" delivered over the world's telecommunications networks in the 1990s.

In simpler times, the role of the ITU as global arbiter of radio frequencies and standards made sense, since without worldwide agreements between governments and the private sector, communications systems like the telegraph and the telephone could not cross borders.

But when the Internet expanded from its origins in academic and Defense Department research in the United States, its basic protocols were adopted voluntarily as more and more computer networks joined worldwide, and its data traveled over the existing telephone infrastructure.

Over time, standard-setting specific to the Internet was taken on by a handful of other organizations, including the Internet Engineering Task Force, the World Wide Web Consortium and Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which was designated by the U.S. Commerce Department to be responsible for the network's addressing system.

It was the U.S. government's relationship with Icann that led to a global uproar over the potential for political abuse of the Internet, although Washington agreed in September to exercise a lighter hand over the organization when it renewed its contract until 2009.

"Internationally, the world will see that the U.S. government is beginning to walk the talk," Paul Twomey, the Australian who is chief executive of Icann, said at the time. "The transition is now in the hands of the international community."

Since then, the ITU's responsibility as a representative of its member nations seems to have regained focus. Some of those involved saw the election of Touré, a citizen of a developing nation, to head the organization for the next four years as a sign that the union would return to more basic issues like access to telecommunications.

Yoshio Utsumi, who turns over his office as secretary general of the agency to Touré in January, had called the Internet a "utility" to be managed for the public good, but the union's precise role was never made specific.

For people like Lyndall Shope-Mafole, a South African delegate to the ITU and director general of her country's department of communications, the organization is the only place where developing nations have a say on a range of telecommunications issues, from allocating radio frequencies and defining international standards to securing universal access to communications.

"Perhaps more important for me is the ITU as an environment for governments to exchange information, to have discussions, to debate and arrive at some global agreement from a policy perspective," she said. And that includes policies concerning the Internet, which as a commercial tool and information channel has the potential to be "life-changing" for Africa, Shope-Mafole said.

"This is a public resource, it is an international resource," she said of the Internet by telephone from Turkey. "And it needs to be managed in a manner that legitimizes all of us, so that all of us are part and parcel of that management and it is not done just by one administration."

For his part, Touré was insistent that the ITU remain separate from the political football that Internet governance had become.

"We are not talking about ITU taking over governance here," he said. "We're talking about ITU continuing the mandate that it has been doing in contributing to the growth of the Internet over all of these years. The Internet runs on a telecommunications platform," and the two parts must continue to work together. "ITU is also very well positioned to call upon all stakeholders for them to get together to manage Internet resources together."

Still, it is language like "management of Internet resources" that worries those who say their biggest concern is that the Internet function smoothly and securely.

Gross, the U.S. State Department official, who represents at the ITU the country with potentially the most to lose from an Internet managed by an international consortium, said that he had come out of the plenipotentiary meeting in Turkey without concern.

"Those are terms we are comfortable with because they are very broad," he said. "There are lots of 'Internet resources' out there, and we believe each government has a very strong and important role to play in ensuring there is an enabling environment for the creation of Internet infrastructure at lower cost."

Icann also said that it "welcomes the emphasis" on digital divide issues and "looks forward to working with the ITU through Icann's Governmental Advisory Committee," said Theresa Swinehart, Icann vice president for global and strategic partnerships.

Ironically, the new secretary general, whose background ranges from satellite engineering to telecommunications regulation and development, will first turn his attention to better communications (in addition to the ITU's budget deficit of $26 million). He has said that he believes miscommunication fueled the fires over the ITU's intersection with the Internet.

"ITU was not trying to have any control over Internet governance, but it was not saying anything, either, and that vacuum was being misinterpreted," Touré said during an interview in Hong Kong. "What I'm saying is ITU has enough on its plate."

At the top of his agenda for 2007 is bringing digital communications to those who do not have full access yet.

Second will be bringing the ITU membership and expertise to bear on the broad topic of cybersecurity, perhaps at the level of an international treaty on topics ranging from computer fraud to spam.

"Security in cyberspace can only be brokered worldwide by ITU because it is the only nonpolitical place in the whole UN system where all the parties are still talking to one another," Touré said, citing as an example a security report he wrote last year that was co- signed by Syria and the United States. "We're the only one who can talk to everyone."

Gross acknowledges the appropriateness of that role. "I think the world in many respects has moved on," he said about the ITU's Internet debate, which was taken up by the new Internet Governance Forum under the auspices of the United Nations in Greece in October. "It's much more about getting the benefits of the technology to people and less about 'Internet governance' writ large.

"One of the great things about the ITU is it has changed over the years, from telegraph to telephone to Internet," Gross added. "We don't want a major international institution to become obsolete just because it couldn't change as the world changes."

Communication, Touré said, is crucial. "We're not selling ourselves well," he said. "I think I will be a better salesman for the union. I want the ITU to be more in the service of the general public."