Is It Really 85 Percent? A Colonial Pipeline petroleum farm in North Carolina in 2006 (J.B./https://flic.kr/p/s4BCU/CC BY-ND 2.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/) Every time a piece of critical infrastructure is stressed by a cyber incident, the public conversation inevitably includes some discussion of the need for a public-private partnership in defending the domain. In the aftermath of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident, that discussion has popped up, among other places, in the New York Times reporting on the incident and the Biden administration’s possible response. Buried in the Times story is the commonplace assertion that public-private coordination is necessary because 85 percent of the nation’s critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector. The Times isn’t unique in its reliance on this data point as a guide to policymaking—leaders like FBI Director Christopher Wray and Sen. Angus King have also publicly referred to it in recent days. It’s not clear exactly why the Times invoked the figure, but presumably this statistic is offered to contrast the American reality with that of other nations. All of the critical infrastructure in, China, for example, is controlled by the state; and it seems plausible (given the generally greater state role in the economy) to believe that even in other Western democracies, such as France or Germany, the state has direct control over a greater portion of the national infrastructure than it does here in the United States.