It's a distributed hierarchy with rules. Every release group is a cell competing against every other release group. It's like the Mafia, you get respect for breaking releases.

Then the releases trickle down to the usenets and private and public torent trackers.

Some sights have rules to encourage speediness, like that only the first 1 or 2 releases per format/quality are allowed to be uploaded.

Nobody cares about second fastest. It's about getting shit out, and out fast.

The rules are designed to do that.