ITU votes in US candidate as first woman chief

I'm willing to bet that the election of Doreen Bogdan-Martin as ITU secretary-general did not rock your world.

The reaction of most in the telecom industry was probably: who? And what?

Frankly, that is to the good. The ITU plays an important role in the telecom sector, but it is a long way from the day-to-day concerns of people in the business.

The UN and its slow-moving agencies are an easy target of critics, though, with perhaps the extremists at either end of the political spectrum the most dissatisfied.

Figure 1: Overwhelming vote rejects Russian plan to remake ITU.
(Source: ITU / V.Martin on FlickrCC2.0)

Among the perennially dissatisfied with the ITU are those fast friends, China and Russia. Both have long talked a good game about resetting global Internet rules to prioritize national sovereignty ahead of openness and free expression.

Russian officials have openly tied these ambitions to the secretary-general election, as this Washington Post column has detailed.

Ernst Chernukhin, a foreign ministry official, reiterated the Kremlin policy of transferring Internet management prerogatives to the ITU, which he claims has the necessary expertise.

Among the functions he wants the ITU to assume is domain management, currently administered by ICANN.

Anyone who recalls the furious conflicts around the formation of ICANN a quarter of a century ago will wonder a) how are Russians going to pull this off and b) why are they so willing to inflict such pain upon themselves?

Plan for ITU restructure

The larger Russian (and Chinese) scheme is to refashion the ITU from a multi-stakeholder organization – that is, with participation from companies and civil society – into a multilateral, governments-only body that is much easier to influence.

In a speech last year, Chernukhin said this plan would be executed by voting for the Russian candidate, Rashid Ismailov, president of Russian telco Vimpelcom, and a former telecom ministry official.

Personally, this looks as if it has been dreamed up by some of the Kremlin's crack military strategists. It is not clear how a single officeholder is empowered to carry out the restructuring of any organization, let alone a fractious UN body with hundreds of stakeholders.

Not to forget that the ITU incumbent for the past eight years, Zhao Houlin, was a Chinese telecom ministry bureaucrat with similar ambitions yet was also unable to remake the ITU.

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Despite all this, the US vs Russia election standoff in the ITU sparked some panicky commentary about the threat to Internet freedoms (here and here).

As it happened, Bogdan-Martin won a thumping victory, 139 votes to 25, making her the first woman to head the agency in its 157-year history.

Besides her obvious credentials – she is a career ITU staffer (and an amateur radio operator and member of IEEE) – the vote perhaps reflects confidence in the way the global telecom and Internet sectors are run.

If that seems surprising, recall that we have more than 6 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, the industry last year delivered 932 Tbit/s in bandwidth and when challenged at the height of the COVID crisis, it stepped up to keep the world running.

There are plenty of big problems to be solved, including the 2.7 billion yet to go online, but it's clear that few people in the industry think they can be fixed by putting more power into the hands of Russian and Chinese bureaucrats.

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— Robert Clark, contributing editor, special to Light Reading