UN’s ITU Election May Spell the End of Our Open Internet
29th September 2022
Every four years, the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union (ITU) stages a Plenipotentiary Conference at which member states decide how the organization will steer the development of communications technologies.
The event is usually only of interest to telco and policy wonks.
But this year’s event has become a geopolitical football – and possibly a turning point for internet governance – thanks to the two candidates running in an election for the position of ITU secretary-general.
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The possibility of Rashid Ismailov being elected ITU boss, and potentially driving adoption of censorship-enabling tech like New IP around the world, therefore has plenty of people worried – not least because in 2021 Russia and China issued a joint statement that called for “all States [to] have equal rights to participate in global-network governance, increasing their role in this process and preserving the sovereign right of States to regulate the national segment of the Internet.”