An earlier membership organization founded in 2000 by Cisco, Network Appliance and major service providers to promote open standards for content peering. The alliance was expected to deliver a content peering protocol that enabled interoperability between content delivery networks (CDN) so they could expand beyond current borders. The protocol was expected to define such attributes as source of content, quality of service expected and billing details, so that content distributed throughout the network could be billed to the content provider (the customer) after it was delivered. See content peering and CDN.