The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) kicks off its quadrennial plenipotentiary on Monday, and internet governance organizations are bracing in case the event becomes a forum for nation-states to try to challenge their roles. The ITU is the United Nations’ specialized agency for information and communication technologies, meaning its members are nation-states. The body’s role is to facilitate international connectivity, which it does by managing radio spectrum, satellite orbits, and working on relevant technical standards. Its key standards are pervasive. ITU-T X. 509 sets out the rules of public key infrastructure. ITU-T E. 164 governs telephone numbers. ITU-T H. 264 and 265 define the video codecs used for most online streams. The ITU’s role is largely uncontested, yet its work gets very close to that of the organizations who work on technologies that make the internet work. Those bodies include the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF); the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which oversees the domain name system; and the regional internet registries (RIRs), which manage IP addresses. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) works on HTML, CSS, and accessibility. Governments participate in work at those internet governance bodies but are just one voice among many and can’t override the consensus-driven decision-making process they use, under a system which has come to be known as the multi-stakeholder governance model. At a 2025 event called WSIS+20, the United Nations endorsed multi-stakeholder governance by deciding that its Internet Governance Forum (IGF) should become a permanent body. That decision effectively endorsed multi-stakeholder governance, and kept the ITU out of internet standards. Yet the IGF hasn’t met since WSIS+20, so it is yet to start operating meaningfully as a permanent body. This year’s ITU meeting is therefore a moment at which stakeholders can stress-test the delicate balance between the ITU, internet governance bodies, and the emerging IGF…