Doreen Bogdan-Martin was elected on Thursday 29 September as Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the body responsible for standardizing standards for communication tools at the global level, from television to the Internet, including mobile telephony. The American candidate collected 139 votes against 25 for her opponent, the Russian Rashid Ismailov. Despite the campaign of support from the American administration, Mme Bogdan-Martin was not entirely certain of winning, with member countries voting by secret ballot, which complicates predictions.
The programs of the two candidates were quite similar, emphasizing the institution’s key missions, such as connecting the 3.7 billion people to the Internet who do not yet have access to it in the world. However, against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, the candidacy of Rashid Ismailov worried supporters of an open and decentralized Internet, because of his career: after having worked for many years for the Russian subsidiaries of Nokia and Ericsson, this historian by training had taken a position in the Chinese company Huawei , then served as Russia’s Deputy Telecom Minister from 2014 to 2018, a highly political post. For the past two years, he has chaired one of the big Russian telecom operators, VimpelCom, in a context of stiffer surveillance of Internet users.
Aligned with China
In addition to Rashid Ismailov’s past, the possible election of a Russian general secretary was a concern because of his closeness to his Chinese partner, the two countries having formed a partnership around Internet regulation.
China indeed militates for an accentuation of the control of the communications. In 2019, Beijing has proposed to modify the operation the routing of information through the Internet, classifying it by type of content. A program called “new IP” (“New IP”), and which, according to Beijing, would offer many advantages, such as the possibility of offering an irreproachable Internet connection to surgical operations carried out remotely, giving them priority over other content passing through the Internet.
But such a program also paves the way for greater content censorship. A report from the Oxford Information Lab commissioned by NATO, to which the British media Info Security had access, points out that such granular control, enshrined in the foundations of the internet, would put more power in the hands of internet service providers (ISPs). However, in authoritarian countries like China, these ISPs are directly controlled by the state. Interviewed by american magazine Wiredthe technical director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, Mallory Knodel, argues that “ the Internet, at its lowest level, should pass data agnostically”without trying to distinguish the types of content from each other. “Thanks to this agnostic circulation, the control of information [par les Etats] is more difficult”she says.
An eight-year Chinese mandate
Would the election of a Russian general secretary have led to the adoption of this measure? This is far from certain since the previous secretary general of the ITU was himself Chinese: Zhao Houlin had notably served as minister of communications in his native country before leading the ITU for eight years. However, it was under its general secretariat that the Chinese proposal for a new IP was rejected by the member countries of the ITU.
Still, the power of the secretary general is not zero. According to the magazine WiredZhao Houlin has been accused in particular of having favored Chinese digital neocolonialism in the countries of the South, by signing an agreement in 2019 with the Bank of China aimed at increasing the coverage of the Internet, within the framework of the “new Silk Roads”, the controversial Chinese influence program.
During her four-year mandate, the new Secretary General of the ITU will ensure the interoperability of the workings of the Internet, in particular by developing the standards of satellite, telephone and terrestrial communications. The question of the role played by China should continue to arise, since the country has maintained its new IP program, which it has renamed IPV6+.
Doreen Bogdan-Martin knows perfectly the mysteries of this institution born in the 19th century where 193 states are represented as well as hundreds of companies operating in new technologies. She worked there for 26 years, gradually rising in the hierarchy, after beginning her career in Washington, at the US Department of Commerce.