There will always be CDNs, just not a CDN Alliance

In November 2023, Faultline penned the flippant headline: ‘There will always be CDNs, but will there always be a CDN Alliance?’ 

The answer has arrived sooner than many expected.

Less than three years after raising that question—and around five years after formally launching—the CDN Alliance is winding down. As Faultline revealed exclusively last week, the non-profit industry group will cease operating by the end of 2026, bringing an abrupt end to an organization created to represent one of the internet’s most critical, yet often overlooked, technology sectors.

Former or non-members may not yet be aware that two of the Alliance’s three working groups are being dissolved.

Only the Traffic Radar Working Group will survive, continuing independently of the CDN Alliance, although its long-term stewardship has yet to be announced.

The CDN Alliance was born from a period of uncertainty for the CDN industry.

A succession of high-profile outages affecting providers including Akamai, Fastly and Cloudflare exposed just how dependent the modern internet had become on a relatively small group of global delivery networks. The Alliance’s mission was to improve collaboration, education and standardization across the broader CDN ecosystem.

The truth is, its ambitions were always bigger than its membership.

Despite positioning itself as the industry’s collective voice, the CDN Alliance never persuaded the biggest CDN slingers—notably Akamai—to join.

Instead, its membership settled into a niche community of smaller CDN vendors and specialists, including companies such as Tinify, focused on image optimization, alongside regional infrastructure providers.

Even so, the non-profit found opportunities to influence industry discussion.

It became a vocal participant in the European fair share debate, arguing against proposals that would require content providers to compensate ISPs for the traffic they generate.

Former Chairman Mark de Jong consistently argued that CDNs were not disappearing—they were evolving. His view was that the market would support fewer, more specialized CDN providers, while successful operators would increasingly diversify beyond content delivery into adjacent services.

That prediction proved partially accurate. While Akamai has built a substantial cybersecurity and edge computing business based on its historic CDN success, relatively few CDN providers have replicated that transition successfully.

The collapse or retrenchment of companies including Edgio, StackPath and Lumen’s CDN businesses illustrates how difficult it has become to compete on content delivery alone.

Update: Post-publication, de Jong sent us the following statement: 

“Our goal has always been to improve the overall CDN ecosystem for everyone involved and depending on it, being an independent facilitator. The last years the CDN market has changed as well as the focus of those players within the CDN ecosystem and their willingness to participate. Therefore our added value became less relevant. We still believe there will be challenging times ahead that will further impact the CDN ecosystem, if we look at the market dynamics and the geo-political changes ahead. We do hope this will be handled bilaterally between the different actors within the CDN ecosystem moving forward. All activities will stop at the end of 2026 and any activities, where relevant, will be handed over or will continue independently.”

What legacy? 

Perhaps the CDN Alliance’s most lasting contribution came not from lobbying but from documentation.

In September 2025, the Low Latency Working Group (LL-WG) published its first low latency streaming whitepaper, introducing clear definitions for terms such as low latency, ultra-low latency and real-time streaming—buzzterms that are routinely bandied about by executives, engineers and marketers alike without consistent meaning or clear definitions.

For researchers, analysts and journalists, this literary refereeing provided a valuable reference point. Even as the organization disappears, those definitions will outlive it, at least until another trusted standards body or industry consortium revisits the terminology.

For a recap, below is a run-down of the LL-WG’s “standardized” terminology in increasing order of latency.

Ironically, Faultline suggested last year that the logical future for the CDN Alliance was not independence, but consolidation. Following the announcement at IBC 2025 that the Ultra HD Forum would merge into the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA), it seemed plausible to us that the CDN Alliance might eventually follow.

The fact that the CDN Alliance is dissolving instead of merging reflects the state of the industry.

The SVTA already operates a Low Latency WG, while the CDN Alliance’s own Definitions WG has now been retired. Maintainingparallel organizations covering similar technical ground was becoming difficult to justify.

But not everything will vanish. As we said earlier, the Traffic Radar WG, the project’s publicly accessible platform for monitoring ISP, IXP and CDN performance, will continue operating independently. The tool has been one of the CDN Alliance’s most useful contributions, providing visibility into network bottlenecks and routing performance

The CDN Alliance also leaves behind useful research into the realities of multi-CDN deployments. One survey, gleaned from a summer 2025 live roundtable attended by Faultline, found that 41% of respondents believed multi-CDN management was becoming more difficult, despite significant improvements in automation.

While APIs and orchestration tools offered some hope with simplified deployment, operators continue to struggle with inconsistent metrics, feature parity, fragmented logging and limited standardization between CDN providers.

Meanwhile, during its formative period in 2021, the CDN Alliance hoped to build closer relationships with standards bodies working on DNS and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), encouraging greater coordination across internet infrastructure. In practice, few tangible takeaways emerged from those efforts as more immediate priorities took precedence.

A similar ice bath reality surfaced in discussions around private CDNs. Building in-house CDN infrastructure today is no longer the capital-intensive undertaking it was two decades ago, with cloud infrastructure dramatically lowering the barrier to entry.

But still, delivering consistent performance across thousands of ISP networks, handling localized congestion and maintaining global reliability continues to be the tricky part—and one that separates specialist CDN firms from everyone else.

Ultimately, though it never became the unified voice of the CDN industry that its founders envisioned, the CDN Alliance will be remembered for its practical work, while fostering technical debates and helping inject some much-needed precision into a narrative being steered by vague marketing jargon.

Not every industry body needs to totally reshape its market to have been worthwhile.

See a ‘best of’ collection of CDN Alliance articles here:

·         There will always be CDNs, but will there always be a CDN Alliance?

·         CDN Alliance unveils 3 working groups – D stands for Definition

·         CDN Alliance hosts full-body health check—results inconclusive

·         Multi-CDN is inevitable, but still a nightmare to operate

·         Low-latency label debunked by CDN Alliance