The techniques described employ a cooperative organization of network
service providers to provide improved distributed network services. The
network service providers that are constituent to the cooperative
organization represent various perspectives within the overall Internet
content distribution network, and may include network owners,
telecommunications carriers, network access providers, hosting providers
and distribution network owners, the latter being an entity that caches
content at a plurality of locations distributed on the network. Aspects
include managing content caches by receiving control signals specifying
actions related to cached content that is distributed on a network, such
as the Internet, and forwarding the control signals through to the
caching locations to implement the actions represented by the control
signals, thus providing content publishers the capability of refreshing
their content regardless of where it is cached. Aspects include managing
content caches by receiving activity records that contain statistics
related to requests for cached content, segregating the statistics
according to which content publisher provides the content associated with
the statistics, and providing to each content publisher statistics
corresponding to content provided by that content publisher, thus
allowing them to monitor requests for their content regardless of where
it may be cached on the network.