Backbone Cabal

The backbone cabal was an informal organization of large-site administrators of the worldwide distributed newsgroup-based discussion system Usenet. It existed from about 1983 at least into the 2000s.

The cabal was created in an effort to facilitate reliable propagation of new Usenet posts: While in the 1970s and 1980s many news servers only operated during night time to save on the cost of long distance communication, servers of the backbone cabal were available 24 hours a day. The administrators of these servers gained sufficient influence in the otherwise anarchic Usenet community to be able to push through controversial changes, for instance the Great Renaming of Usenet newsgroups during the 1980s.