This Vote Could Change the Course of Internet History

This week in Romania, a US State Department candidate is facing a Russian challenger in an election for the leadership of one of the most important international technology bodies in the world.

Who wins could determine whether the internet remains a relatively decentralized and open platform—or begins to centralize into the hands of nation-states and state-run companies that may want great control over what their citizens see and do online. Yet, with just days to go before the vote, the race for secretary-general of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has garnered painfully little attention.

It’s a two-person race: On one side is the American, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a former Commerce Department expert on telecommunications who joined the ITU in the 1990s. She’s squaring off against Rashid Ismailov, the former deputy minister for Russia’s telecommunications ministry.

According to their election platforms, Bogdan-Martin and Ismailov signal the same core objective: connecting every person in the world to the internet and cellphone service by 2030. The two candidates, however, represent fundamentally different visions for the future of the internet. Bodgan-Martin’s campaign has focused on her track record of navigating the complex machinery of the United Nations body. Ismailov, meanwhile, has promised a “humanization” of telecommunications infrastructure—and has invoked his candidacy as a way to reject American “dominance” online.

If the wrong candidate wins, says Göran Marby, head of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the stakes couldn’t be higher: “People around the world might not be able to connect to one single interoperable internet.”

Today, the ITU technically sits under the auspices of the United Nations. But it predates the world’s major deliberative body by about 80 years.

Originally established to do things like standardize the Morse code alphabet and codify the standard distress call, the ITU is today responsible for creating standards and interoperability between an array of services and technologies and expanding access to modern communications platforms.

Maintaining interoperability is an unsung but critical job. The ITU needs to ensure that all countries can agree on allocating space on the radio frequency spectrum, and it assigns orbital slots to various communication satellites, amongst other tasks. For example, the ITU is the reason a Japanese cellphone can still work in Dakar, and vice versa.

Unlike other UN bodies, the ITU is not merely the purview of nation-states: Its members include 190 nation-states, as well as 900 corporations, research bodies, and NGOs. (Only nations can vote in leadership elections, however.) For the past eight years, the organization has been led by Secretary-General Zhao Houlin, who had been rising in the ranks of the sprawling ITU bureaucracy since he left the Chinese telecommunications ministry in 1986.

Kristen Cordell, an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), has called the ITU “the most important UN agency you have never heard of.” Decisions made at the international body, she argued, “have a tremendous impact on the everyday lives of Americans.”

Authoritarian states like China, Cordell wrote, “have increased their interest and activism in the ITU, leading to concerns that their outsized influence in standards setting may lead to the bifurcation of the internet.” Houlin’s time at the helm of the organization, according to Cordell, has been marked by “highly favorable comments and decisions in support of Chinese companies.” Those companies have, in turn, ramped up their involvement in the ITU. Huawei alone has submitted some 2,000 new standards proposals to the organization, according to Cordell.

In 2019, Houlin signed a memorandum of understanding between the ITU and the Export-Import Bank of China to expand internet access through the Global South under China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. The initiative has been criticized as a form of neocolonialism: hooking up countries, particularly in Africa, to high-interest loans that leave them beholden to Chinese investment.

Proposals from Chinese state enterprises and from Beijing itself suggest, in their words, a “New IP” and are purportedly a response to a lack of innovation in how data is processed at the lowest levels of the internet. China has suggested that tagging data packets by their intended purpose could improve data routing and reduce latency. Beijing, in ITU proposals, offers altruistic examples, like prioritizing streaming data associated with virtual surgeries.

Critics, however, say the issues diagnosed by China are already being addressed and that such a proposal would likely worsen these fundamental problems, not improve them. The Internet Society, a US-based nonprofit that promotes internet openness, derided the proposal as one likely to make those identified problems worse and said it ignores progress in making the patchwork of different systems and operators play well with each other. “Creating overlapping work is duplicative and costly. In the end, it does not enhance interoperability,” wrote Internet Society analysts Hascall Sharp and Olaf Kolkman.

Many see an ulterior motive. This new balkanized internet “would lack free and open standards and be primed for manipulation by autocrats that seek to limit civil liberties and human rights,” Cordell argues.

“The internet, at its lowest level, should be data-agnostic,” says Mallory Knodel, chief technology officer at the Center for Democracy & Technology. There is “less information control if the data is agnostic,” she says.

“New IP would centralize control over the network into the hands of telecoms operators, all of which are either state-run or state-controlled in China,” reads a 2020 report from Oxford Information Labs, prepared for NATO and obtained by Infosecurity Magazine. “So, internet infrastructure would become an arm of the Chinese state.”

Members of the ITU have largely shot down these proposals for New IP. But that doesn’t mean China is giving up.

Fiona Alexander, a cofounder of Salt Point Strategies who is also part of the American delegation to the ITU, points out that there is a “sleight of hand” going on with some of the authoritarian regimes as they advance proposals like New IP—most recently, China has rebranded that proposal to the innocuous-sounding “IPV6+.”

China has acknowledged that increased central control is, in its view, an upside of these proposals. “States have the right to make ICT-related [information and communications technology] public policies consistent with national circumstances to manage their own ICT affairs and protect their citizens’ legitimate interests in cyberspace,” reads a set of 2019 submissions written by Beijing.

This kind of work is, traditionally, not the purview of the ITU. Nongovernmental groups, like Icann and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), tend to be more directly responsible for managing the actual protocols that govern the internet.

The Russian candidate to replace him, Ismailov, is no stranger to China’s international policy: He spent three years as a regional vice president at Huawei. From there, Ismailov rose through the ranks of the Russian Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications before joining Nokia and later Russian telecommunications firm PJSC VimpelCom.

Beijing and Moscow have made no secret of the fact that they’re on the same page at the ITU.

A 2021 pact between Beijing and Moscow committed both countries to flexing their muscle when it comes to international technology governance, with an eye to “preserving the sovereign right of States to regulate the national segment of the Internet.”

“Russia and China emphasize the need to enhance the role of the International Telecommunication Union and strengthen the representation of the two countries in its governing bodies,” the agreement concludes.

Ismailov has been transparent that his view of the organization stands in stark contrast to that of his American competitor.

“Americans are, perhaps, allergic to everyone who has anything to do with Huawei,” Ismailov said in his official, 30-minute campaign video. “I don’t understand why this has happened.” He added that the “demonization” of the Chinese company was done, in his view, “out of fear of competition.”

While Ismailov said he would “strive to avoid this politicization” of the organization, he also pledged to defend Russia against consequences levied for its war in Ukraine.

“I want to make sure that the organization focuses more on its actual objectives—frequencies standardization, etc,” he said, through a translator, in his campaign video. “Of course this won’t be totally possible because technology is now an integral part of our everyday life, including geopolitics. We are seeing this with the sanctions that are being imposed. Russia is being pressured in all international organizations—some want to strip it of its voting rights, others want to expel Russia.”

In a press conference in May, Ukraine’s head of the State Special Communications Service, Yurii Shchyhol, said his country had moved to sanction Russia at the ITU as a denouncement of its invasion of Ukraine—what Ismailov euphemistically refers to as a “special military operation.”

If she wins, Bodgan-Martin will be the first woman to lead the ITU—she will also be the first American to lead the organization since 1965. While the State Department says Bodgan-Martin’s candidacy is a matter of having “the right candidate at the right time,” her bid for the job is no accident.

Houlin’s first candidacy for the secretary-general position, in 2014, went unopposed. In 2017, the Trump administration unveiled its National Security Strategy: a hodgepodge of tactics to counter China’s rising influence in the world. In it, the White House identified the protection of a free and open internet as a top priority and set “active engagement in key organizations” as necessary measures, mentioning the ITU by name.

Yet at the 2018 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, Houlin again ran unopposed—his re-election bid was supported by 176 of the 178 countries present.

Ahead of the vote on September 29, at this year’s conference in Bucharest, the United States seems to be taking the race seriously. Members from the American delegation, as well as a senior official at the State Department who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Bodgan-Martin has been campaigning intensely. A litany of photos posted to Twitter, and a surprisingly active hashtag, show her meeting with technical and civil society groups around the world.

In February, the United States appointed Ambassador Erica Barks-Ruggles as their representative responsible for the ITU conference—with marching orders to get Bogdan-Martin elected. She appeared before a House foreign affairs subcommittee late last year to underscore the fact that the United States’ focus on the ITU election, amongst others, meant “countering the efforts of countries such as the People’s Republic of China and Russia to reshape and undermine international law, institutions, and standards.” President Joe Biden has also released a statement endorsing Bogdan-Martin.

“What we’re really hearing from countries around the world,” the official says, is that connecting the roughly 3 billion people on the planet with no access to the internet is a top priority—closing the so-called digital divide. “We learned during Covid the stark digital divide that’s out there, and they want it closed as soon as possible,” the official said.

On that, they said, Bogdan-Martin “is focused like a laser.”

Ismailov, meanwhile, is trying to turn the race into a referendum on America.

“You can clearly see the two camps humankind is divided into: developing countries and the West,” he says in his campaign video. He set up the United States, and the West more broadly, as a monopolistic entity with respect to the internet.

“They encouraged extremist resources on their platforms at the same time they eradicated anyone who goes against their agenda,” Ismailov adds, citing Donald Trump’s Twitter ban as a prime example. In the friendly interview, Ismailov was asked about Russian media, such as RT, being taken offline in the United States and Europe. Ismailov likened it to “cancel culture.”

Ismailov drew a stark comparison: The Soviet Union’s development of nuclear weapons, followed by China, “offset everyone’s ambitions and made the perception of risk very tangible.” There had not been the same nuclear arms race in the telecommunications space, he says.

It’s a message that could just work, but the Americans are paying it no mind. “He’s focusing on a very negative vision, moaning about things,” the official says of Ismailov. “Let him do that.”

The State Department official spoke on background, and the department declined to make Bogdan-Martin available for an interview. A request to the Russian mission in Geneva, where the ITU is located, went unanswered.

While there was some quiet optimism about Bodgan-Martin’s chances, none of the experts and delegates to the ITU who spoke with WIRED were willing to predict her victory. Even though Russia has lost a number of major votes at the UN in recent months, the race for secretary-general is—unlike many other votes at the international body—a secret ballot, leaving room for horse-trading.

Some of Russia’s appeal is macro: The Beijing and Russia compact is undoubtedly attractive to less democratic countries that want to be free to regulate and restrict the internet as they see fit. Ismailov might also be attractive for other reasons. Earlier this year, Russian satellite operator Intersputnik announced that the country would be sponsoring a 200-seat cafeteria at the ITU’s new Geneva headquarters.

The top-tier race isn’t the only one that matters, however. At their annual meeting later this month, the ITU members will also select a number of senior functionaries, elect the make-up of regulatory boards, and choose a new council. All of those races have the potential to determine the way the ITU approaches these core questions over the next four years.

The secretary-general race will, however, signal what direction the organization is headed. Göran Marby, CEO of Icann—a core administrator of the technical infrastructure of the internet—would not officially endorse Bodgan-Martin, but he told the organization’s annual meeting last week that voting for Ismailov would mean “people around the world might not be able to connect to one single interoperable internet.”

Marby said he was remaining neutral, but added: “We vividly oppose one of the platforms, that the Russian potential secretary-general stands for.”

In an email statement, a spokesperson for Marby told WIRED that Ismailov’s candidacy threatens to further centralize control within the ITU, taking those authorities away from stakeholder groups like Icann.

“Technically, this is not possible,” they wrote. “The internet operates based on a system of voluntary standards, best practices, cooperation, and trust.” This cooperative model, they added, “is a model that works. The internet has operated without fail for nearly 40 years.”

While reiterating their neutrality in the race, the spokesperson added that “if the functions of Icann were moved to the ITU, the risk of internet fragmentation would be very real, and the interoperability of the internet would be jeopardized.”