
The devil you know?
As awful as the US government is in so many areas, it does tend to follow the very strong American traditions for protecting free speech (we may be forced to see if this survives a Trump or Clinton presidency, both of whom have indicated they would like to attack the First Amendment). Even most Western European governments seem very eager to jump into politically-convenient censorship, and things get worse as you head East. While ICANN can't directly censor web sites (yet), control over the DNS infrastructure goes a long way in that direction.