Excerpt from Business Insider

A tiny island microstate has today launched proceedings that could have profound repercussions for who controls the internet.

The Government of Niue, a tiny island 2,400 kilometres northeast of New Zealand, has demanded a “redelegation” of its national webspace, .nu, from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the supranational non-profit that coordinates top-level domains to ensure the stable operation of the internet.

It’s a battle that’s almost as old as Hotmail – and if fights over internet governance had weight divisions, then this would be a heavyweight card.

“This is the big one,” said Pär Brumark, the Swedish domains expert who is leading a delegation on behalf of the tiny Pacific island.

His pro-bono team of professors and legal academics from major Scandinavian universities have, he says, constructed the most detailed analysis of problems with ICANN rules and their allegedly poor implementation ever to be undertaken.

“We’ll lay it all out. It’s a proof of concept of how messed up the system is.”