This week in the sunny and extravagantly wealthy Dubai, the United Nations brought together delegates from around the world in secret to discuss how exactly they will destroy the Internet and change life on earth forever. Whoa, scary! Right?

Maybe. Although there are a group of Internet users who like to think the world’s governments make their decisions based on James Bond movies and would like nothing more than to send a SWAT team into their basement, that’s probably not the case. The scariest part of the ITU WCIT (or International Telecommunication Union World Conference on International Telecommunications, for those of you who aren’t as fond of acronyms as the U.N.) is that there is a lot of uncertainty about what exactly they are deciding.

For us college students, the Internet has always been a part of our lives. We played games against our friends, we used AIM to talk to them after school, and we researched nearly all of our papers on the Internet. Now, between our laptops, smartphones and tablets, we are almost never without it, spending our days tweeting, Facebooking and Googling.

So although this meeting is overhyped by conspiracy theorists, it is still important. One of the amazing things about the Internet is the innovation it inspires: Facebook, Google, Spotify, online games, apps and all kinds of different services people love and use everyday were created by people using the power of the Internet. And people use these services to do other amazing things, like creating a company, promoting a charity or a new band or even organizing revolts against their own governments.

That last part is what gets people worried about the WCIT. Although the Internet has been a free-flowing exchange since its inception, many worry that governments will try to overregulate it. On whatistheitu.org, opponents to the meeting suggest that authorities may gain enough power to shut down access, allow more monitoring of users and impose more fees to access certain services.

The U.N. representatives see their “secret meeting” as having a different purpose. Since international treaties on telecommunications have been the same since around 1988, it needs to be updated to include more items on spam, IP address allocation and access in poor nations. The Internet is not just an imaginary cloud; in order to work a vast network of physical items like servers, cables and the organizations that run them are required. All of these “real-life” things are regulated and controlled by real people, including governments.

Google has been vocal in opposing the meeting, creating a page titled “Take Action” where people can become informed and step up to say they also support an open Internet. But while there is a lot of hype about a U.N. meeting in Dubai, Internet users should realize we don’t really have a fully open Internet. And although Google seems like a cool company (and let’s be honest, they are; Bing doesn’t make their logo into instruments just for fun), in the end, they want the same thing as all Internet-based companies: to make money off of you. Google loves to sell ads and collect as much information as possible about you in order to feed you even better advertisements. A truly free Internet is not one where you second guess your clicks, wondering if companies are following you around.

That is why no regulation of the Internet is not always a good thing. While I am willing to give up some of my privacy for what Google has to offer, I want to know what I’m giving up to which companies. And that is also the problem with the UN meeting: Leaders could make decisions that hurt the fantastic things the Internet allows us to do, or it could improve it.

Given that this is a meeting organized by a bunch of governments, the chances of something productive happening are probably not high. But we should, to an extent, be able to know what decisions are being made and be able to give input on how the Internet should be regulated. The Internet can be a great place, but it is also a bad place that can also be improved tremendously. Unfortunately it isn’t up to us to decide, but don’t worry as much about the U.N. as should about the ads you’re clicking on after you exit this page.

Tim is a junior in Engineering. He can be reached at [email protected].