Ambassador Steve Lang on WRC-27 and International Telecom Diplomacy

Sarah Oh Lam: Hello! Welcome back to Two Think Minimum, a podcast of the Technology Policy Institute. Today is Thursday, January 29th, 2026 and I’m Sarah Oh Lam, a Senior Fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. I’m here with my co-host, TPI President and Senior Fellow, Scott Wallsten. Today’s podcast is a discussion with Ambassador Steve Lang, currently a senior advisor at Crest Hill Advisors and non-resident senior associate with CSIS. He is a veteran diplomat and international policy leader. Ambassador Lang started our discussion with an overview of the WRC meetings.

[Steve Lang was confirmed by the Senate as U.S. Coordinator of International Communications and Information Policy, with the rank of Ambassador in 2024, and served in that role until 2025. He also served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Information and Communications Policy from 2022. As coordinator, Steve led U.S. delegations to numerous international conferences and negotiations, including WRC-23. In his 30-year career as a U.S. diplomat, Steve has served in Japan, Mexico, China, Taiwan, Thailand, and Cuba.]  

Ambassador Steve Lang: The ITU, the International Telecommunication Union, is a UN body that oversees a lot of telecommunication and digital technology issues globally and brings countries together to work on those issues. The ITU Has 3 different, bureaus or divisions. One of them is the Radio Communication Bureau, which manages the World Radio Communication Conference (WRC), usually every four years. The ITU has four major conferences. One of them is the World Radio Communication Conference, and it brings countries together to harmonize the use of radio frequency spectrum around the world. To try to make sure that when you get off a plane in another country, your cell phone works to make sure that that plane has access to communications wherever it goes, to make sure that, Our military’s radar can work in places around the world, and to make sure that companies can produce Wi-Fi equipment or Bluetooth equipment on, with economies of scale, for large markets. It’s really kind of technical, but it’s so important to our economy, but also our national security, transportation safety, so many aspects of our lives, especially as we increasingly are using mobile technologies and wireless technologies.

Scott Wallsten: You’re describing it almost as a standards body, which it, I guess, partly is, but it’s more than that, too. It’s often been a way to protect state-owned incumbents, or now just incumbents. How do you view it as a venue that promotes progress versus one that, prevents progress. Then we’ll get into the details of what’s coming up before, but I’m just, you know, interested in these high-level questions.

Ambassador Steve Lang: I think we could have a whole conversation about whether or not it’s a good tool for coordinating and harmonizing internationally. It’s the only tool we have, and I do think some level of harmonization is critical on radio frequency spectrum for national security, safety reasons. But I also think we can get a lot of benefits from it, economically, as I mentioned, to enable companies to produce, potentially at a global scale. for larger markets. But, it is a challenging organization. Every country has a seat at the table, including some very difficult and challenging adversaries that we have. There are some advantages in that the ITU does allow private sector participation to a limited extent, but it is limited, and so that also makes it less than ideal, I guess, in some ways.

Sarah Oh Lam: That’s fascinating. What are your views on the meeting in Shanghai, China? There are so many layers of policy, but also logistics.

Ambassador Steve Lang: As you mentioned, and as many of our listeners will know, that the conference, WRC-27, is going to take place in Shanghai this year, or next year, which brings a whole bunch of challenges on its own. There are some challenges that we have for any conference. Perennial challenges to preparing successfully, no matter where the location is.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Any WRC and preparing for, it has challenges, and some of these perennial challenges are really driven by the timing of the preparatory cycle. I think the important thing to remember is that the preparatory cycle between conferences is constant. The agenda for the next conference is set at the previous meeting, so WRC-27’s agenda was set after a lot of discussion and debate at WRC-23 in Dubai and the studies and the preparations and proposals for the next conference proceed continuously throughout the four years in between. As a result, affecting the outcome of the conference is, you know, a little bit like that old metaphor of changing the course of an aircraft carrier. The earlier you start to do it, the easier it is. At the same time. the United States has its own internal preparatory process, which is also continuous throughout the four-year cycle, and we have to bring all of our stakeholders together to develop U.S. positions and inputs to ITU studies on the WRC agenda items, which takes time and takes a lot of work to coordinate that. We can talk a little bit more about that process if you like, but the key point is that we need to know what we want at the conference before we can really start effectively engaging diplomatically with our partners. our existing partners and our potential partners and allies on these issues around the world to secure their support of the conference itself, but equally important, I think, is to, you know, have their support during the preparatory cycle when they’re providing their own inputs. The bottom line is that the main challenge is having enough time to decide what our priorities are, and then engaging effectively with our partners to build momentum for the conference.

Scott Wallsten: The timing sequence makes that particularly interesting, I think, because it then crosses administrations. In normal times, how did that work? How does that work now, when we have an administration that seems to do everything ad hoc at best.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Because these issues are quite technical, there’s more consistent and not very political–, there’s a lot more consistency across administrations, and so the challenges that you see in a change of administration are, I would say, less intense. But I think one specific challenge is–and we can talk more about why this is important– but for each conference, we identify a head of delegation who’s usually hired as a special employee of the State Department and comes on board to work and prepare for that conference. And lead that process, because of the way it fits in the cycle we often have a new administration coming on board at around the same time we really want to be gearing up and hiring that person. Getting all the people in the new administration’s leadership in place to make that decision can take some time and create an additional challenge there.

Sarah Oh Lam: I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the meetings in Shanghai, since you are a China expert. For 10 years you were in the region, and so, you know, there’s high demand for that expertise right now. Tell us more about you know, China-U.S. policy vis-a-vis them, and what it means to be taking a delegation to Shanghai.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Specifically with regard to the challenges of holding the conference logistically there, broadly speaking, I think there are two main issues. One is information security, and the other is the conference chair. As many folks will know, there will be a lot of concerns about the security of the U.S. delegation’s communications while they’re on the ground in China, and that applies both to making sure that they have secure electronic communications, but also that they can have confidential conversations in person on the ground in Shanghai with some level of confidence. This is going to require, I think, a lot of advanced work by the U.S. government to make sure that we have as many mitigation measures in place as possible to try to provide that level of security and confidence. But the second issue is that the host of the conference, the host of the WRC– the host government traditionally chooses the chair, which is usually one of its own government officials or regulators, and the chair is, of course bound by ITU rules, and expected to manage the conference in an objective and neutral fashion, but their influence over the outcomes, through how they manage the process is definitely not insignificant.

Scott Wallsten: How did it come to be that it was scheduled for Shanghai.

Ambassador Steve Lang: That’s kind of a long story in and of itself. I would say that, I believe that China’s decision to offer to host, is driven in part by U.S. success in increasing its influence in the conference. Many folks will know that the ITU Secretary General is Doreen Bogdan Martin, who’s an American citizen. who was long time, for a long time, she was, an official, at the ITU. Previously, she had worked at the Department of Commerce, here in Washington. And Doreen, was elected to that position in 2022, but previously, for 8 years, a Chinese citizen was the Secretary General of the conference, so during that time, China was able to install a lot of its own people in the organization. The election of Doreen really, I think, reflected a setback in China’s influence in the organization, and their offer to host the conference in China reflects an effort to try to restore some of that influence. You know, one of the challenges we had with this particular decision on the host for WRC-27 was that Rwanda had initially offered to host, and in general, for these conferences, kind of the standard operating procedure is that the first country that offers to host is the one that winds up getting that opportunity. It was, in my view, a bit of a process foul for China to then subsequently come in with its own bid. I don’t know what kind of conversations took place between China and Rwanda, but, Rwanda, very late in the process, just ahead of the decision, being made in Geneva, Rwanda pulled out, pulled its bid, which made it very difficult at that point to try to, to affect another outcome other than China hosting. 

Scott Wallsten: That kind of raises two other questions. One is that, you know, is the ITU just becoming another venue for great power competition? The other is, do you expect that the Chinese will lead a truly neutral conference, or will behave in a neutral fashion, even though the leader of the conference is supposed to? I mean, he’s got to also appeal to his bosses in the Chinese, you know, in the party, right? How do we know that everything will be above board.

Ambassador Steve Lang: I think pure neutrality would be a very high bar for anybody to respect. Yes, so I think the goal here needs to be to make sure that China manages this conference in as much as possible in a neutral and objective way. I think in order to make sure that happens, and this is happening, the U.S. government needs to engage with our partners and overseas, other governments, that would share our concerns. It needs to work with the ITU to make sure that we’re all aware that there are these very important concerns, these very realistic concerns, and to make sure that we’re keeping the pressure on China, to show that it can host this conference in a neutral way. I do think that especially because China is trying to increase its influence in the organization, that they will feel some pressure to try to make sure that their hosting of the conference is viewed as a success. But we have to be very vigilant, and very proactive in making sure that that pressure stays strong.

Sarah Oh Lam: Are there precedents for other treaty conferences or meetings in China for U.S. diplomats to be going in such a big delegation, or has this been done recently?

Ambassador Steve Lang: I can say that one of the working party meetings for the ITU, for the WRC process was held in China last, I believe it was in April of 2025, so I think we learned some lessons from that. But I couldn’t provide you a more kind of holistic answer on other conferences, on other issues.

Sarah Oh Lam: It seems like there’s a lot of work to be done by State Department to prepare, to bring so many people over, FCC, NTIA. From your experience as head of delegation, what would that look like, to be preparing, and then also working with your counterparts in the other agencies?

Ambassador Steve Lang: In terms of preparing for the conference taking place in China, I guess from the start, I would just say that I’m confident that my old colleagues in the U.S. government and leadership in the U.S. government are very much aware of these challenges and are working hard to address them. One of the first steps is that, as part of the process, the ITU has to negotiate a host agreement with China to set general ground rules for hosting the conference. The U.S. government needs to be working closely with the ITU, and working in coordination very closely with our allies and partners who share our concerns. To make sure that the agreement addresses as many of these issues as possible, and sets a high standard for China’s hosting of the conference. And that also has that effect of creating pressure on China to make sure that its leadership knows that their performance in hosting the conference is going to be highly scrutinized by the international community.

Sarah Oh Lam: Does that mean providing spaces that are secure? Logistically, what does it mean for the agreement to outline favorable conditions?

Ambassador Steve Lang: It could mean things like that, and I’m hesitant to really get into detail on the specifics of what that might include, but definitely those are the kinds of things that should be taken into consideration. At the same time, the U.S. government needs to be working now, internally, with all the agencies who will participate with our information security experts, with the companies, and other stakeholders who are likely to participate in the delegation to make sure that we’re taking as many mitigative steps as we can to have secure communications and be able to operate effectively on the ground and to make sure that we have full participation from all those stakeholders.

Scott Wallsten: How do you think, Doge and other downsizing and loss of institutional knowledge across the U.S. government is affecting our ability to both prepare and perform at the WRC?

Ambassador Steve Lang: I do know that the State Department still has a very strong team working on these issues and the U.S. government understands how radiofrequency spectrum is important to our natural security and economic interests. I would just encourage our leadership to continue to prioritize it, and to work hard to make sure that we have the team that we need on the ground there. That may include needing to hire more people, replacing folks who might have left, but I think the most important thing is to identify that head of our delegation for the conference as soon as possible, to make sure that we have someone who is able to identify the needs, and then advocate on behalf for the resources that are necessary.

Scott Wallsten: Logistically, or in an organization sense, who makes that decision? Is it the Secretary of State, or is it more at a more technical level that you pick that person?

Ambassador Steve Lang: To pick the ambassador, it is a State Department decision in the end. I’m not sure who exactly in the current configuration of the State Department will make that final call, but, I would anticipate that it would be made in coordination with key players in the interagency, in consultation with the FCC, NTIA, White House, but in the end, it is the State Department that’s hiring that person, and that is, that leads that preparatory process.

Sarah Oh Lam: From your experience, being in that role, it’s a pretty unique perspective. What was the year like going up into WRC-23? How much did you talk to the FCC, NTIA? Was it mostly internal State Department prep? What are tips or best practices that you think are important for WRC preparation?

Ambassador Steve Lang: First of all, I have to note that I came into the process for WRC-23, or I came in to lead the process relatively late. I replaced Anna Gome as now commissioner of the FCC, who the State Department had hired to lead the delegation. When she was confirmed as Commissioner, that leadership, the delegation was transferred to me. I can’t remember if it was August or September of 2023, ahead of the conference, which began in November. I was coming in quite late. I had been tracking the process throughout, because it was my team, that was working with Anna, based on Anna’s experience, and then my own. It is a full-time job, and you have to be working closely with FCC, NTIA, stakeholders, and then also our foreign partners around the world, and try to engage as much as possible. Anna did so much travel in that year in advance, going to regional meetings and engaging with individual countries bilaterally, and like I said, it really is a full-time job, and it’s also why it’s really important to hire that ambassador as soon as possible.

Sarah Oh Lam: What’s your view on the regional CITEL position-making, and coming to a U.S. position, and allies’ positions, and industry positions? Is it hard to juggle all those consensus mechanisms? I guess the most important is what the U.S. position will be, but how do you see the regional and the ally and industry positions?

Ambassador Steve Lang: It’s a really good question. There are different stages in the process where we have to try to reach consensus with the ultimate goal of reaching a consensus at the WRC globally that matches what our priority is, but it starts with our own domestic process, and that has two branches. One is led by the FCC through the WRC Advisory Group, the WAG, which includes stakeholders from industry and also non-governmental organizations, that provide input on private sector views on what our position should be. Then there’s a separate branch led by NTIA to coordinate federal government agency views, and they gather together all the different agencies that use spectrum, all the branches of the military, FAA, NASA, many others that are sometimes surprising, that have interest in how spectrum is used to develop federal agency views. Then the NTIA and FCC processes come together, they try to reconcile those positions. State coordinates and oversees that process. Usually, we’re able to reach a consensus, without too much difficulty. If there is a real challenge there there’ll be more discussion, White House may get engaged, and because that process takes time, that’s another reason why I think it’s important for us to make sure that U.S. leadership is prioritizing this and trying to accelerate as soon as possible, so that we can get out there and start engaging our partners around the world build their support as well. And then, once we have our positions, you mentioned CITEL and the regional groupings, I think it’s helpful to understand that proposals and contributions to studies for the WRC and other ITU conferences often come from the ITU’s– I think it’s 6– regional groupings. The U.S. belongs to the Americas group, which is called CITEL, which is the Spanish acronym for Inter-American Telecommunications Commission. There are also groups for Europe, Arab countries, Africa, there’s a group for former members of the Soviet Union, although some of those, like the Baltics, Ukraine, belong to the Europe group now. And then there’s also an Asia-Pacific group as well, and there’s also some overlap. There are some countries that are in the Africa group and the Arab group. We work through CITEL, to try to develop proposals that can be presented as CITEL proposals, because they carry more weight when the proposals are coming from a region. I think we have an advantage through CITEL in that it’s a group where we have a lot of friendly countries that share a lot of our priorities. I think it’s relatively easy to reach consensus there compared to a group like APT, which includes China, Japan, India, Australia. In our group, we’re often able to come up with good proposals that have broad consensus. Then when we get to the conference, because we’ve worked out some of the issues, our group has both developing and developed countries, often are our proposals through CITEL are well received at the global level.

Scott Wallsten: How sure are we that, any given regional group, or what any regional group’s objective is? Does China influence the African group, for example? I can’t imagine that, that the African group was very happy about it moving from Rwanda to China, but it did happen. What’s happening behind the scenes that affects the way these regional blocks operate?

Ambassador Steve Lang: Well, I’m sure China is having a lot of conversations with African countries and leaders about these issues, and I’m sure they had a lot of conversations about the location of the conference, and I don’t know any details of the content of those conversations. I hope, and I’m sure that we will, that our U.S. leadership will be having conversations with African countries as well about our priorities and what we want to see happen at the conference. I think that’s all part of the process, and we need to make sure that we’re making a strong case for why the proposals that we have, the priorities we want to achieve, also benefit our partners globally.

Sarah Oh Lam: Thatraises a good question that I’ve always had about the way that a treaty is decided– it’s not a real vote, it’s not a legislative process, but each country has one seat or vote, How does that work, are the world powers trying to win over all the small countries, like, to go their way? How is the sausage made, like, the treaties coming to agreement? We don’t know if it’s a slight majority or unanimity on each agenda item. We just hear the final treaty outcome. From your experience, how does that look?

Ambassador Steve Lang: I think the key point to emphasize here is that the ITU hates voting. The ITU always tries to operate on the basis of consensus, and that can be very cumbersome, and it can lead to results like issues being kicked down the road. But in general, it tends to work okay on technical issues like the ones decided by the WRC. Votes are extremely rare, and I don’t think we, I don’t think we had any votes in WRC-23, but when votes do occur, they’re more likely to be on political issues related to telecommunications, like, issues related to Palestine, or Ukraine, or topics like that. For example, we had a vote on the WRC location at the Geneva ITU Council meeting last summer, where it was decided to host the conference. I think it’s fair to say that a vote on one of the technical spectrum issues at WRC-27 would be very surprising.

Sarah Oh Lam: Within the voting mechanism, how is consensus achieved? If there are so many countries, then who leads the way? Or I just, I don’t understand the treaty-making process.

Ambassador Steve Lang: It’s a little opaque. Proposals come up through the working parties, and they’re hashed out there. A lot of conversations behind the scenes, a lot of proposals for compromise language, sometimes there are footnotes or exceptions, but they work up through the working parties, and then through committees of the conference, and then finally come to the plenary for approval. Usually by the time they get to the plenary, there’s no need for any further discussion, and they’re incorporated in the final outcomes.

Scott Wallsten: What’s the point of the conference, if by the time it actually happens, all the decisions have de facto been made?

Ambassador Steve Lang: Well, they haven’t been made before the conference. During the four-week conference, there are meetings of these working parties that lead to committee meetings that take place at the conference, and then they come to the plenary. The plenary meetings are only a very small portion of the actual conference.

Sarah Oh Lam: Within the working parties– I’m just analogizing with legislation– it’s like a bill markup? And then the working party leaders agree or decide when the markup is complete? But then that internal decision-making process is not governed by rules but it’s just the way the working party finds consensus?

Ambassador Steve Lang: Well, there are rules, but they usually don’t result in a vote, and yes, I think your analogy to bills being marked up in committee is a fair one. So that when they get to the plenary, they’re essentially approved by unanimous consent, or I’m not sure what exactly our congressional analogy would be there.

Sarah Oh Lam: I see. In this WRC-27, there are a lot of satellite items. At what level does the U.S. advocate for their position. It’s before the working party level, or within those discussions?

Ambassador Steve Lang: It has to be all of the above. There are working party meetings taking place, as I mentioned, continuously throughout the preparatory cycle, and so we need to be engaging throughout that process. We need to be engaging outside that process with our partners. But yes, at every level, we need to be working together to try to make sure that we’re making the case for our priorities. You mentioned satellite issues. Yes, there are a ton of satellite issues on the agenda for WRC-27, so that’s going to be a really hot topic.

Sarah Oh Lam: Who leads the working parties? Is it which countries have leadership positions within those groups? Who can call the shots, or shot clock, or process?

Ambassador Steve Lang: That’s a whole other part of the process, which is also very challenging, choosing chairs for various committees and working parties. Usually they are, there’s a discussion to distribute them among the different regional groupings. Regional groupings will put forward nominations for folks. The regional groupings will have their own internal conversations about who they want to put forward for individual positions, and there will be, chairs and vice chairs. Often there are many vice chairs for each group at each level, so you may even have all the different regional groupings represented at the vice chair level. But that is a process in itself, and can be quite challenging. We’ve had a lot of, difficult conversations and, confrontations, in recent years on Russian nominees for chair positions of different working parties in different groups.

Sarah Oh Lam: Is that selection a vote on who becomes the chair and vice chair?

Ambassador Steve Lang: That could be.

Sarah Oh Lam: Oh, so the process is, it could be consensus, and then if not consensus, on who’s the chair, then it’s a vote?

Ambassador Steve Lang: Yeah, I would have to double-check on how often that’s happened, but I do think it has for chair positions.

Sarah Oh Lam: It just seems very, fluid, but is there some sense that the chair or vice chair needs to be a major power, or someone we like, or, someone who’s experienced and influential? How do these working parties decide who gets to lead that working party?

Ambassador Steve Lang: That’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of conversations behind the scenes about which positions are important to us, and which ones we want to make sure there is, and it’s not always necessarily a friendly country. This is a relatively small community of international spectrum experts who all know each other. It might be a matter of, you know, who can actually run this meeting effectively as well. But yes, so there are a lot of conversations behind the scenes and jockeying and trading of nominees of who we want to put forward in these conversations. There’s a whole process there, and our participants, our U.S. government officials who go to these meetings all the time, they’re very clued in and savvy about the process, and are pretty effective in making sure that we have people that we can work with in the key positions. There are some positions that we care less about, so sometimes folks are encouraged to pursue those instead, but like I said, a lot of jockeying and trading behind the scenes.

Scott Wallsten: So, you mentioned that satellite is a big deal this time. How do you expect that to play out? There are a lot of technical debates, but we also know that incumbents here, are really trying hard to block lots of LEO progress, for example, because they’re really invested in the GEO paradigm. And, of course, that’s also true around the world. Sometimes the people who have been involved in these issues for a long time, as part of the institutions themselves are incumbents, and don’t like to see change. How is this likely to play out at the WRC, where sort of radical progress seems to be so different from anything the ITU ever likes?

Ambassador Steve Lang: Yeah, that’s a really, really good question. By some counts, I think 80% of the agenda for WRC-27 will be related to satellites, so it really is dominant for this next conference. You have identified one of the most important reasons. We have this boom in the space economy in general, and we have a race to return to the moon, but especially the explosive growth in low Earth orbit constellations is driving a lot of this activity, and also a lot of the debate, around it. There is a dynamic between these low Earth orbit or non-geostationary orbit (NGSO providers) and geostationary orbit (GSO providers), that, drives a lot of the discussion. We did see it play out in WRC-23, where some of these issues were very difficult, and companies on both sides were very active in working with governments around the world to try to influence the process. Satellite companies, you know– it takes a lot of money to invest in these technologies, and so they’re large, and they have a lot on the line when it comes to these issues. So, they are working hard to advocate for their positions around the world. How it plays out at WRC27, I can’t say for sure, but I think one thing that will be interesting. It’ll be to see if the dynamic will have shifted, because there will be more people and countries benefiting from low Earth orbit technologies. Now that Starlink is operational and providing services in so many countries around the world, how that plays out and changes the dynamic, I think will be very interesting to see.

Scott Wallsten: The other part of that is that they may also view the U.S. as so far ahead that they, or U.S. companies, as so far ahead that they want to slow that down, even if they are now more in favor of low Earth orbit per se.

Ambassador Steve Lang: That is possible. Yeah, that is definitely possible, I think, though, that a lot of the proposals are about the technology and not the specific companies. So, even if they’re worried about U.S. domination of the technology of this space there may still be room to support this technology in general. But I do think you’re right, that a lot of countries will be watching this with an eye towards making sure that there’s still an opportunity for them to participate in this part of the economy.

Scott Wallsten: A related question, and I don’t know that there’s really any answer to this, is how much do personalities affect us? In this case, Elon Musk. I mean, obviously, he’s responsible for SpaceX and Starlink, and his technology is just amazing, but he is also, let’s say, controversial. Does that affect how these negotiations and discussions go, or can people set that aside to focus on the technical and economic aspects.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Well, even without focusing specifically on Elon Musk’s personality, I think because Starlink has really been, up to now, the only company providing this service, low Earth orbit internet broadband, broadly. How they do it has very much an outsized impact. When other systems come online, I think the next one we’re likely to see at a broad scale is Amazon Leo’s system. That, I think, will change the dynamic, and in general, competition is good for any marketplace, and for working on these issues.

Sarah Oh Lam: Some of these items, 1.1 to 1.19, I’m looking at the WRC-27 agenda items, a lot of them are, most of them are, satellite, as you said. It’s very technical, items that are related to fixed satellite service (FSS), mobile satellite service (MSS), allocating for IMT use versus satellite use, NGSO versus GSO, and additional uses, like, eSIM. When it gets to that technical level, it is, like, a standards body discussion. I guess that’s kind of what Scott was asking. There are political, geopolitical concerns, but then this is also very technical. How much do the politics versus engineers decide these things?

Ambassador Steve Lang: A really good question, and I think important to emphasize that for most of these issues, the engineers are really driving the conversation, that there are technical issues, and they don’t rise to a political level. In the space area for WRC27, you mentioned a lot of them. You have the spectrum allocations that include satellite uplinks, satellite downlinks, transmissions between satellites, fixed satellite service, mobile satellite service, Earth Stations in Motion (ESIMs). So, yes, a lot of different technical issues, and then you have ones that are slightly less technical, well, still quite technical, but technical and operational issues for direct-to-device transmissions, in addition to the spectrum frequencies that they used. Then we have things in the satellite and space area. For this conference, we also have transmissions on the lunar surface. So that, I don’t know, has the potential to be maybe a little bit more political than some of the others. I think a much more political issue will be unauthorized transmissions. I think that’s Agenda Item 1.5, which is about whether or not satellites need authorization to transmit over Individual countries, whether or not a country can ask or instruct a satellite company to stop transmissions over their territory. I think that one is very much more on the political end of the spectrum and more likely to get that kind of higher-level political attention.

Scott Wallsten: I assume it’s more political because many countries would like to prevent Starlink, and hopefully soon, Amazon’s Leo, from providing service in their countries. Iran, I’m sure, would very much like to not have Starlink there, although they already try not to.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Yes, very much so. I think Iran is driving that conversation to a large extent.

Sarah Oh Lam: Part of this work is always agenda items for the next WRC, or study groups. Do you foresee more lunar discussions? What is on the horizon for 4 years from now?

Ambassador Steve Lang: I definitely think that space issues, satellite issues, are going to continue to be a much larger portion of the agenda than they were in previous conferences going back farther in time. So, more of that, for sure. Beyond that, I’m not sure I have a good crystal ball for predicting exactly what’s going to be on the next agenda item, but definitely more on satellites and more on space, and probably more on lunar transmissions, and then, I don’t know, maybe we’re going to have to start talking about transmissions on Mars, or in Martian orbit.

Scott Wallsten: If I could mix metaphors, look back on your crystal ball– I’m not a meetings person, these meetings would drive me insane– but it seems like this part of it could be really fun, right? Because you’re really trying to figure out what’s going to happen.

Ambassador Steve Lang: I definitely think it’s super cool, and I particularly love the lunar transmission issue. I think that’s very exciting, the idea that we’re actually gonna have infrastructure and presence on the Moon that will require this kind of coordination. Looking forward, yes, I think we’re going to see more of the same. I think low Earth orbit technologies, satellite constellations, and the service they provide are super exciting and cool, and the growth there really is explosive. China just put in a filing with the ITU that I think is for another some 200,000 satellites. Blue Origin just announced in the last week or so their plans to launch their own low Earth orbit constellation.  

Scott Wallsten: 200,000 satellites?

Ambassador Steve Lang: That’s what’s been reported. Yep.  

Scott Wallsten: Starlink has, like, a couple thousand, right? Two to three thousand.

Ambassador Steve Lang: I’d have to double check. I think it’s a little bit more than that.

Scott Wallsten: I mean, they’re going for more than that, but, you know.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Yep, so more of the same. More growth, more challenges, it’s getting increasingly crowded in that orbit, and, I’m sure you’re aware, this creates other follow-on concerns. Radio astronomy is a big factor in these discussions, and whether or not or how these constellations may interfere with observations, their ability to make observations on the ground. Then there’s the whole issue of space sustainability, one that I really don’t think is one that the WRC should be getting into but certainly is related.

Sarah Oh Lam: Great. Thank you so much, Ambassador Lang, for talking about your experience, at WRC. We definitely need to hear more commentary from folks like you who have a global perspective. WRC is technical and also political, which makes it interesting. So, thank you, Ambassador.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Thank you. I think it’s super interesting and important. These technologies are going to affect how we live our lives, and especially as we were discussing with these global satellite constellations, these issues increasingly are global in nature.

Sarah Oh Lam: Great, thanks.

Ambassador Steve Lang: Thank you.