Science & Tech Quote by Robin Hayes

“Private sector interests” is doing a lot of diplomatic labor here. Hayes’ line is a carefully polished description of Internet governance that sounds like a civics lesson but lands like a quiet warning: the network that markets itself as borderless is, at key chokepoints, domesticated. The intent is less to map the Internet than to frame it as an asset already housed inside U.S. institutions and therefore legitimately guided by them.

The subtext is sovereignty-by-proxy. By emphasizing that the Internet is “run” by private actors “within the United States,” Hayes normalizes an arrangement where corporate stewardship stands in for public accountability, while “supervision” by a nonprofit created by the Department of Commerce gives it a veneer of neutrality. It’s a neat rhetorical hedge: not quite government control, not quite laissez-faire, but a hybrid that implies stability and competence while sidestepping the uncomfortable question of legitimacy for everyone else on Earth.

Context matters: this language echoes debates around ICANN, the DNS root, and U.S. oversight that intensified in the 2000s and 2010s as other governments pushed for more multilateral control through bodies like the ITU. Hayes is speaking into a geopolitical argument where “open Internet” is often code for “U.S.-aligned governance,” and “internationalization” is cast as a pathway to censorship or authoritarian capture.

What makes the quote work is its understated audacity. It reduces an unruly, global commons into an organizational chart, then treats that chart as self-evidently acceptable. The calm tone is the power move.