A look at the vote for secretary general of the UN's International Telecommunications Union between a US and a Russian candidate, and its open web implications
or whether autocratic countries like Russia and China get to set the rules. https://www.wired.com/... Margrethe Vestager / @vestager : .@ITU is here to ensure that #DigitalConnectivity benefits us all. And we need strong leadership to deliver this. Together with the #EU Member States I support @tlamanauskas as the next @ITU Deputy SG. #tomas4itu Go Tomas! https://twitter.com/... Tren Griffin / @trengriffin : 1/ The management team of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is elected at the Plenipotentiary Conference. The ITU is a treaty organization that operates based on consensus. There is no ITU army or police force to enforce its decisions. https://www.wired.com/... James Griffiths / @jgriffiths : “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’.” https://www.wired.com/... James Mulvenon / @jmulvenon : Out of the splinternet fat, into the splinternet fire. Replacing a Chinese government cheerleader with a Russian apologist and former Huawei exec? Wired: This Vote Could Change the Course of Internet History https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The ITU secretary-general vote was framed as a referendum on who writes global telecom rules: a US-backed candidate promising an open internet versus a Russian candidate backed by Moscow. The stakes trace directly back to China's New IP proposal at the ITU, whose top-down design critics said would hand governments granular control over the network.
The vote also capped years of groundwork: Beijing had spent years building influence across standards bodies like the ITU, IEEE, and 3GPP while the US and EU pushed back, and a 2021 China-Russia pact committed both to shaping international technology governance around sovereign control of national internet segments. In the end, Doreen Bogdan-Martin won decisively, beating Russia's candidate 139 votes to 25, with the EU separately rallying behind Tomas Tlamanauskas for deputy secretary-general.
First-order effects
- Bogdan-Martin's 139–25 win puts a US candidate at the head of a treaty organization that operates by consensus, immediately shifting which agenda — open connectivity or state-controlled segments — drives the ITU's leadership.
Second-order effects
- The lopsided margin weakens the case for state-controlled alternatives like New IP inside the ITU, but the China-Russia governance pact means Moscow and Beijing are likely to redirect their sovereignty-first efforts toward venues where their voting blocs carry more weight.
Third-order effects
- If consensus-based bodies keep rejecting top-down architectures, the structural risk shifts from one organization's leadership to a fragmented standards landscape, where rival blocs pursue parallel internet governance tracks rather than contesting a single forum.
The trend: Global internet governance is hardening into a contested standards race between an open-internet coalition and a China-Russia sovereignty bloc, with ITU elections as its most visible scoreboard.