As the UN’s telecom agency kicks off its four-yearly summit, a last-minute shake-up hits the race to lead its radio and satellite sector, while Russia attempts a return to the organisation’s Council.
Over the next three weeks, the International Telecommunication Union’s 194 member states will meet in Doha to choose its leaders and set its future course. The Plenipotentiary Conference, the UN tech agency’s supreme body, will elect the five top officials and its 48-member Council. It will also adopt its strategic and financial plan for the next four years and negotiate the resolutions that steer its work.
“Since the first conference in 1865, technical experts have gathered to discuss technical issues but also to take political decisions,” explains Gabriele Balbi, professor of media studies at the Università della Svizzera italiana, about the UN’s oldest specialised agency. This time round, over 1,000 representatives from academia and the private sector will weigh in on discussions. “This techno-diplomacy at ITU allows for making political decisions by making technical choices”.
Races to lead key roles
Leadership elections at the agency begin on 12 November. With Washington’s backing, its secretary general, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a United States national running unopposed, is seeking a strong mandate for a second term.
The biggest shake-up, however, is set to be a day later at the ITU’s Radiocommunication Bureau, which keeps the global register of satellite frequencies and orbits, and whose director, Mario Maniewicz, a Uruguayan, is concluding his second and final mandate. Just days before the conference, however, India surprisingly withdrew its candidate, Revathi Mannepalli, a Radio Regulations Board member who could have been the first woman to lead the bureau, leaving France’s Eric Fournier and Germany’s Alexander Kühn in the race.
“These situations are not uncommon,” Tomas Lamanauskas, the ITU’s deputy secretary general, told Geneva Solutions. Neither Mannepalli nor the Indian mission replied to requests to comment. India is still seeking re-election to the Council and has bid to host the 2030 plenipotentiary.
The winning European candidate will hold the keys to the satellite register at a sensitive moment, amid SpaceX‘s dominance in space. The company, led and founded by Elon Musk, has more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, representing roughly two-thirds of all active satellites.
Read also:Inside the UN tech agency role in Musk’s space conquest
If SpaceX has taken advantage of the ITU’s first-come, first-served system to lock in frequencies early, occasionally filing through other countries, many governments are now asking for tighter rules on megaconstellations at the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference, another ITU gathering to review radio regulations scheduled to take place in China, when crucial bands for 6G and for satellites beaming directly to phones will also be decided.
For Balbi, who also authored a book on the ITU’s history, SpaceX’s rise illustrates the biggest shift since the organisation’s early days. “With the fall of public telecoms monopolies in Europe in the 1990s and the rise of Big Tech, the key players are now private companies, which don’t necessarily need ITU conferences to make decisions. Yet these conferences have become more important, since they allow low- and middle-income countries to promote digital inclusion”.
Elsewhere, the US, which has withdrawn from several other UN organisations, hopes to gain a seat on the ITU’s Radio Regulations Board. The Board is a body of experts that plays a central role in how the Radio Regulations treaty is applied and interpreted and shapes the global rulebook on who can use frequencies and for what purposes, including mobile networks and commercial and military satellites. Given the political stakes, Washington is backing industry executive Jennifer Warren for the role.
At the Telecommunication Development Bureau, which promotes connectivity in low-income countries, Zimbabwean director Cosmas Zavazava is seeking a second term against Estonia’s Nele Leosk.
Surprisingly, Lamanauskas himself is not running for a second term as deputy secretary general, unlike his recent predecessors. The post is now up for grabs by three candidates from Brazil, the Bahamas and Bahrain. “I want to normalise the fact that one can come for one mandate and deliver,” he told Geneva Solutions while declining to discuss his next move before he completes his term.
Russia’s comeback bid
Elections for the Council may deliver the conference’s most significant political signal. Competition is fiercest in the Eastern Europe and Northern Asia group, where eight countries are chasing five seats. All five current holders, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, are running again. They face challenges from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Russia.
The last plenipotentiary, in Bucharest in 2022, was a diplomatic rout for Russia, when, seven months after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Moscow lost on every front. Its candidate for secretary general, Rashid Ismailov, lost to Bogdan-Martin by 139 votes to 25. It also failed to keep its seat on the Council and was voted off the Radio Regulations Board.
Four years on, it is attempting a comeback with Nikolay Varlamov, who served on the Board until 2022, and is running for one of the region’s two seats. Russia will have to unseat one of the five incumbents. The outcome will be read as a test of how far Russia’s diplomatic isolation has eased in UN bodies. A return to the Council would give Moscow a voice again in the ITU’s budget and oversight between conferences.
From AI to emergency calls
Beyond the elections, the conference is expected to decide on several major technological issues.
In 2022, one month before ChatGPT’s release, member states adopted the ITU’s first resolution on artificial intelligence, setting the agency’s technical work in the field, from standards to studies on AI in telecom networks. Member states now want to decide how far that role should go, and what “the best way to ensure that ITU’s mandate is best implemented in this changing technology landscape,” says Lamanauskas.
Quantum technologies, cybersecurity, child online protection, and the security of submarine cables – which carry most of the world’s internet traffic – will also be discussed, along with measures to ensure that networks continue to operate during disasters and humanitarian crises. “Digital is now a lifeline, and that lifeline is especially needed in emergencies,” he says.
Furthermore, the question of how involved a UN body should be in running the internet is set to return to the conference’s agenda. Delegates will discuss the future of the ITU’s Council working group on internet policy, open only to governments. Most countries want to keep it as it is, while others – particularly Russia and China – want to widen its scope to give countries a stronger role in internet governance and in shaping its technical protocols.
“The risk to the open internet today isn’t one big takeover,” says Adrian Wan, director of policy and advocacy at the Internet Society, an ITU sector member. “It’s many small decisions that each move a piece of internet governance behind closed doors, accessible only to certain groups, such as governments.”
Improved financial standing
Four years after the agency faced what it called an “unprecedented” deficit of CHF4.8 million, the ITU is in a better financial shape. In 2026, the Council redistributed more than CHF11 m in savings, of which CHF2.3 m went to the radio sector, after space companies complained that satellite filings took too long and were too costly as megaconstellations flooded the system. ITU reported that processing time was halved as a result, from 17 months in June 2025 to eight-and-a-half months at the end of October, against a regulatory target of four months, “demonstrating positive progress”.
The US remains the ITU’s biggest funder, contributing just over CHF 11m a year to the organisation’s CHF165 m budget, followed by Japan, Germany, France and China. Russia, which contributes CHF4.8 m, also remains among the top ten contributors.
Meanwhile, the long-delayed building of a new ITU headquarters in Geneva is back on track, with the demolition of the current building, constructed over 60 years ago, due to start in 2028.
