Some of that equipment is operated by a company called CDNetworks, a so-called content delivery network. Such networks can be traced back to 1995, when Tim Berners-Lee of M.I.T., one of the inventors of the World Wide Web, foresaw that it would be crippled with congestion once it became popular. He issued a challenge: Find a better way to deliver content over the Internet.

No signal can move faster than the speed of light. In practice, signals move much slower than that, because nothing travels in a straight line on the Internet. Signals traverse stretches of copper or fiber, and are shunted to other segments via routers and switches as they zigzag to their destinations.

“The milliseconds really add up,” said Jim Davis, a senior analyst at 451 Research, a technology market research company. “Every chance you get to reduce those kinds of issues getting in the way of buying or selling something — it adds up to revenue.”

That has led to the rise of countless local hosting services and the content delivery networks. The delivery networks often have servers distributed around the world. A website pays to have its content available on all those servers so that when a customer types in a query, it is directed to the nearest server, which may be only a few miles away. Delays vanish.

But hosting gambling websites in the United States carried an obvious risk.

“If I were advising an entity that is accepting American players,” said Joseph M. Kelly, a professor of business law at the State University College at Buffalo, “I would advise them to keep everything overseas.”

Doing that was much easier before splashy graphics and data-rich presentations took the place of simple, written text. To compete, gambling sites needed faster communications to bring the data secretly home, a fact apparently realized by Pinnacle. Hiding in plain sight, it remains elusive.

To help identify how and where Pinnacle and other gambling companies hosted their websites, The Times turned to Dyn, the Internet performance company, which archives 150 billion data points a day on patterns in web traffic.