The ITU is the FCC’s older, slower, more ceremonial cousin, the one that wears a suit to family dinners and insists on being called by its full title: the International Telecommunication Union. It lives in Geneva, pretends to be the neutral referee of global spectrum and orbital slots, and in practice is a UN body that runs on national lobbying and endless committee meetings.

Formally, the ITU’s Radio Regulations govern who can claim what chunk of frequency and which orbital slot. Countries file through their administrations, not companies directly, so OneWeb files through the UK, Starlink through the US, Telesat through Canada, and Bharti piggybacks on India or the UK depending on which filing set they’re talking about. This is why spectrum fights at the ITU are basically diplomatic scuffles disguised as engineering disputes.

The process is glacial. You submit a filing, wait years while other countries comment or object, then spend more years at World Radiocommunication Conferences arguing over footnotes. The joke in industry is that by the time the ITU “resolves” a dispute, the constellation in question is already obsolete, bankrupt, or both. That’s not far off: Teledesic, Skybridge, and half the 90s LEO graveyard went through ITU channels before collapsing.

Where the FCC hands out licenses with clear domestic bias, the ITU pretends to arbitrate fairness. But sovereignty still wins. If the US or France wants something badly enough, the ITU can drag its feet, but it won’t block it. Meanwhile, developing countries show up to WRCs demanding “equitable access” to spectrum and orbits, then quietly lease their unused filings to bigger players for cash. It’s a shadow market in paperwork, and everyone knows it.

For satellite operators, the ITU is more about paperwork strategy. You file early, you file often, you secure priority dates, and then you sit on them like real estate titles. Filing doesn’t mean you’ll build, it means you’ve squatted. That’s why the ITU database is clogged with “paper constellations”, hundreds of thousands of notional satellites from companies that will never launch a thing but want a bargaining chip.

So when operators talk about “playing by ITU rules,” what they usually mean is: file something, fight in Geneva every few years, lease filings if you can, and hope your national regulator, the FCC, Ofcom, ANFR, DoT, … does the real heavy lifting.

In short, the ITU is the church; the FCC is the cop.