Late last week, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., announced he was leaving the Senate to become president of The Heritage Foundation, the country’s most influential conservative think tank. From his new office perch just five minutes from the Senate floor, DeMint, a tea party gladiator, will enjoy unrestricted power to pursue America’s ideological renewal at six times his Senate salary. Members of Congress cashing in on their experience is nothing new. But it would be wrong and simplistic to assume DeMint is trading his institutional power as a senator for money and ideological purity.

The latest battle over who governs the Internet is taking place right now. Representatives from more than 150 nations gathered in Dubai last Monday for the World Conference on International Telecommunications, a two-week meeting hosted by the International Telecommunication Union, a specialized agency of the United Nations. Their mission: to renegotiate International Telecommunications Regulations treaty, which governs global interconnection and interoperability of telecommunications traffic. The outcome could change how the Internet works.

The new Congress next year will likely inherit high-stakes standoffs over many complicated issues, from financial credibility to immigration. Our elected leaders must be able to make difficult trade-offs and craft policies that reflect the best expert knowledge.

In its current dysfunctional state, however, Congress cannot have nuanced deliberations or make knowledgeable judgments. One big reason is that it no longer has the capacity to produce unbiased public-interest information.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is little known, but it wields a tremendous amount of power: It controls all of the Web’s top-level domains (those letters after the “dot,” like .com and .org). Currently, ICANN is in the midst of creating hundreds (and possibly thousands) of new, generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that span a host of different ideas, from .web to .cars to .anything_else_you_can_imagine. These new gTLDs have the potential to dramatically affect the future of Internet browsing, and they’re already stirring up some serious discussion.