Akamai CEO wants help to defeat piracy, reckons he can handle edge AI alone

Interview After 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 ...