As part of a worldwide conflict between democracies and authoritarian governments over the direction of the internet, the United States and Russia are squabbling for control of a United Nations group that sets standards for new technology.

Officials from the United States are pressuring the more than 190 other International Telecommunication Union members to support Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a longtime American employee, in her bid to lead the U.N. agency on Thursday. The International Telecommunication Union is a body that creates technical standards for technology like cellphone networks and video streaming. Rashid Ismailov, a former official in the Russian government, is her opponent in this race.

There has been a lot of effort put into the American campaign. The last week saw the culmination of months of public and private lobbying on behalf of Ms. Bogdan-Martin by senior administration officials and significant U.S. corporate groups.

Whoever takes over as ITU president will have the ability to change the guidelines by which new technologies are produced globally. The group is not generally recognised, but in recent years it has established important standards for how video streaming operates and coordinated the global sharing of the radio frequencies that power cellular networks.

The election has come to represent the escalating conflict between authoritarian nations that wish to restrict their citizens' access to the internet and democratic nations that favour a globally connected and lightly governed internet.

While the United States usually does not censor the material on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, Russia has developed a mechanism that enables it to do precisely that, keeping an eye on what Russians are saying online regarding issues like the invasion of Ukraine.

Some people are concerned that Russia and China, who have also blocked their internet, may utilise the ITU to alter the web in their image. In a joint statement released last year, the two nations urged the preservation of 'the sovereign authority of states to govern the national portion of the internet.' They claimed to be highlighting 'the necessity to improve the representation of the two countries in the governing bodies of the International Telecommunication Union'

ITU will help determine whether people worldwide can afford access to new technology and communicate across borders, as well as 'whether their governments are able to disconnect them from the internet or not,' said Erica Barks-Ruggles, a State Department official and former ambassador to Rwanda who is currently representing the United States at the conference.

The I.T.U. was established in 1865 to address telegraph machine problems. It used to be more concerned with physical networks than the internet, but it is now involved in establishing standards for everything from connected cars to smart homes. The agency's biennial plenipotentiary conference got underway on Monday in Bucharest, Romania.

Moscow is backing Mr. Ismailov, a former executive at Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications firm that American officials fear may be leaking information from its products to Beijing. Mr. Ismailov was the deputy minister for telecom and mass communications for the Russian government.

According to Karen Kornbluh, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, 'I see the United States truly engaging in a new form of foreign policy attack, where they think our competitors and adversaries are attempting to change the rules of the game to block off access.'