The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas. The result of such peer sharing was a network that facilitated peer sharing. This was not mere happenstance. The Internet was built with the belief that power should be distributed rather than centralized and that any authoritarian diktats should be circumvented. As Dave Clark, one of the early participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force, put it, “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”