Dubbed "The Great Internet Speedup,'' this cooperative effort involves deploying an extension to the Domain Name System, which is the underlying protocol that matches Internet domain names with corresponding IP addresses.

Proponents of the DNS tweak say it will decrease the latency end users experience when accessing videos and other large files, and that it offers CDNs a better ways to scale up their networks.

But others say the DNS protocol tweak creates architectural issues and privacy concerns, the latter stemming from the passing of parts of IP addresses in a DNS query. This change to the DNS protocol has been proposed as an experimental document to the Internet Engineering Task Force, but it hasn't been adopted yet by the standards-setting body.