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.