OG CDN boss says fighting illegal streams is about stopping criminals cashing in, not free speech
INTERVIEW When Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently threatened to disrupt the Winter Olympics to protect free speech after Italian authorities fined his company for not disrupting pirate video streams, rival CDN provider Akamai’s CEO Dr. Tom Leighton fired back with what reads a lot like thinly veiled criticism.
“Companies that have lax attitudes about piracy on their networks brazenly hide behind so-called commitments to ‘free speech’,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
In a subsequent conversation with The Register, he reiterated that argument.
“This is a theft of intellectual property issue,” he said. “Free speech is incredibly important. That’s why it is dangerous to equate this to free speech, which is something to cherish and takes a lot of effort to have. I don’t think you want to encumber that with piracy and I think there is no basis for doing that.”
“The right to free speech is not the right to steal somebody else’s content and distribute it.”
The Register put it to Dr Leighton that those who link the issues often do so in the context of IP address blocking, a practice that can stop a pirate streamer but also take out other netizens whose resources share an IP address thanks to the widespread use of network address translation by hosting companies and clouds.
The CEO retorted that IP blocking and other similar measures aren’t the only way to stop pirate video streams.
“It takes some effort to detect piracy,” he said. “It is easier to just ignore it. And less expensive, and especially if you are making money by ignoring it.”
Dr Leighton said Akamai will not allow pirates to use its platform and will always act to crimp illegal streams. The Register asked what the company would do if a legitimate client fell victim to an attack that saw their infrastructure hijacked to perform piracy alongside other workloads.
The CEO said Akamai has experienced just such an incident.
“You get in contact with that customer right away,” he said. “Generally, they are very interested in taking it down because they do not want to be involved. They are very appreciative that we brought it to their attention.”
Dr Leighton suggested Akamai customers will welcome such interventions even if they take place in jurisdictions which, like Italy, require platforms to take down pirate streams within 30 minutes of receiving a notification about distribution of illegal content.
The Register suggested that the prevalence of cyberattacks, and the persistence displayed by pirates, means businesses will need to roster staff to respond to takedown requests at all hours of the day or night.
“Yes,” Dr Leighton responded.
Akamai already has its own technology to detect and deter pirates, which involves content owners watermarking live streams and issuing tokens that identify each authorized viewer. When tokens don’t match, the company can easily identify a dodgy stream.
However, Dr Leighton admitted that Akamai can’t stop piracy alone and said the fact that some profit from piracy – either by charging for illicit streams or using the lure of them to find victims for other scams and crimes – mean a wider response has become necessary.
“This public-private partnership is essential to create a ‘deterrence by design’ environment where the risks of operating a piracy ring far outweigh the rewards,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
The Register therefore asked the CEO to imagine a summit at which major governments, content owners, film and television studios, music labels, major cloud providers and telcos convene to discuss a common approach to piracy – and to comment on what would be a satisfying and effective outcome from such a summit.
Dr Leighton didn’t have a specific answer beyond his desire for "a common agreement to get this stopped.”
“There is reasonable technology that makes a big dent,” he said, but added “nothing is perfect. And the challenge is there are some entities who are not incented to engage in that kind of dialogue, and then enforcement.”
Edge AI needs CDN thinking
One field in which Dr Leighton thinks Akamai can make a difference working alone is advancing the cause of AI, especially at the edge, through Linode – the cloud operator it acquired in 2022.
Linode now offers an inferencing cloud built around Nvidia GPUs. Dr Leighton expressed a belief that agentic AI will soon become popular and will be most effective and satisfying if the inferencing infrastructure that powers it runs in locations physically close to users.
“We are setting up the infrastructure to support that,” he told The Register, and said Akamai aspires to install it in around 100 cities across the world.
Akamai’s Linode-powered edge inferencing offering will likely rely on CPUs and older GPUs, because distributed sites are not suitable for Nvidia’s power-hungry and heated accelerators. The company therefore expects to deploy its edge inferencing kit alongside, or close to, the same points of presence Akamai uses for its content delivery network – a choice Dr Leighton found a satisfying validation of the company’s founding ideas to bring content closer to users – but not to pirates. ®