At the end of September, during its quadrennial plenipotentiary conference, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) will elect its next secretary-general
, the Palace of Parliament in the centre of Bucharest, Romania’s capital, is no monument to democracy. It was conceived in the 1980s by Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s late communist dictator, and built to match the size of his ego. It boasts 365,000 square metres of floor space, much of which stands unused and unheated .
The election would be closely followed even without the complications posed by the war in Ukraine, for it marks a new phase in an ongoing conflict about how the digital realm will be organised in future.
When the internet began to go mainstream in the 1990s, governments—and especially autocratic ones—tried to regain some of their lost power, mostly by commanding the creation of “splinternets”, national networks where different rules applied. China’s approach was the most comprehensive. A sophisticated combination of automated filtering and laborious human censorship tries to keep unwanted content out.
This authoritarian pushback has now entered a new phase, says Emily Taylor, who heads Oxford Information Labs, a cyber-intelligence firm. The ambition, she says, is no longer just to control national internets, but to change the character of the global one.
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