Backbone cabal
The informal club of administrators at the big Usenet sites who, through the 1980s, effectively decided which newsgroups got to exist.
Nobody owned Usenet, but its traffic flowed through a handful of well-funded machines that paid for long-distance calls and passed the news along. Their admins — Gene Spafford and Brian Reid among them — kept in touch on a private mailing list and ended up acting as a board of directors no one had elected. Whatever they declined to carry simply didn't propagate.
This was the group that pushed through the Great Renaming in 1987. When it then blocked rec.drugs, some of its own members answered by creating alt.*, and the cabal's grip loosened as cheaper links and UUNET made the backbone less exclusive. The official line throughout was "TINC" — There Is No Cabal — which is, of course, exactly what a cabal would say.