Doreen Bogdan-Martin's election to the UN's ITU, beating the Russian candidate, signals support for a US-backed open internet, but significant issues remain
Open-internet advocates are breathing a sigh of relief after a recent election for the International Telecommunications Union's top leadership. Tweets: @justin_ling Tweets: Justin Ling / @justin_ling : Russia got handed a massive L at a UN body that will determine the future of a free, fair, and decentralized internet. https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The ITU's leadership vote had become a proxy fight over who steers internet standards: China's earlier New IP proposal to the ITU showed how a top-down architecture could hand governments granular control, and the shift in techno-globalist rhetoric toward national limits set the backdrop. When member states cast ballots, the US candidate won 139 to 25, a lopsided margin for an open-internet-aligned secretary general.
The result matters because the ITU is where state-controlled internet models have sought legitimacy. Bogdan-Martin's win denies that venue to its most prominent challenger — but as Wired's headline notes, the structural issues the vote papered over are unresolved.
First-order effects
- Russia's candidate is defeated and Moscow loses its bid to shape the ITU's agenda from the top, while Bogdan-Martin takes the secretary-general post with a broad mandate to steer standards toward an open model.
Second-order effects
- China's New IP architecture loses its most plausible institutional champion inside the ITU, pushing states that favor government-controlled internet design to pursue influence through standards working groups and bilateral channels instead.
Third-order effects
- Governance of the internet is splitting into parallel tracks — leadership votes won by open-internet coalitions at bodies like the ITU, while national rulemaking (such as the FCC's net neutrality reinstatement) determines openness in practice — making the gap between nominal and usable openness the durable battleground.
The trend: Internet governance is becoming a contest between open-internet coalitions and state-control advocates, fought through standards-body leadership elections and divergent national rules.