AKAM - Akamai Technologies

[DCG]

With all of talk about LVLT on here, I'm curious on people's opinion on Akamai.

 

The stock has come down quite a bit and is now selling for around 18X expected 2012 earnings and 3x BV. They much much more solid financials than LVLT, with no debt and are quite profitable.

 

What I don't have a great understanding of is the type of network they run/own compared to LVLT. Hopefully someone smarter than me can clarify that.

[Guest ValueCarl]

I ran into one of my techie friends with early Yahoo roots yesterday-no longer there-who swore up and down that the tech and business community SWEARS by Akamai, and will keep (3) PIPES dumb as a Do Do Bird for as long as possible. Inquiring minds will often disagree but how much ground can be covered in a local supermarket?  ;)

 

With Comcast holding (3)'s dark fiber from their 2004 purchase, and as many as thirteen leasing years remaining(?), while they're moving to an MIT test ground for all IP open access on all content irrespective of devices chosen, while their owned content channel, CNBC, hosted Akamai's CEO late last week talking all the buzz words about how great they are to the world's internet, I can see a match made in heaven before the Akamai story of not owning the necessary "dumb pipes" were to implode.  :-X          

[Guest ValueCarl]

Things to be expected from MONOPOLISTS gouging consumers, just because they think they can! Akamai remains a dirty little secret housed inside cable and telecom homes, one who has exploited what I have coined, "internet free loading" over the years. Comcast and their ilk belong together. In the end, they will also deserve what's coming to them.  imo 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LVLT

 

 

Disputes

 

On December 8, 2010 The New America Foundation submitted a request to The Federal Communications Commission to investigate the ongoing dispute between Level 3 Communications and Comcast with regard to data trafficking agreements. The request called for an investigation of "whether and how last-mile providers might leverage their relationship with broadband consumers to act in an anticompetitive manner," and how "last-mile providers can leverage their market power to harm their competitors in the market for Internet content."[18]

The request for investigation stems from the decision by Comcast to alter the Peering agreement they had with Level 3 due to the increased volume of internet traffic due to the latter's new agreement to be a primary backbone provider of Netflix on-line streaming content.[18] Level 3 Communications agreed to pay a new fee but maintained the view that it goes against Federal Communications Commission regulations that prevent Internet Service Providers from "favoring certain types of traffic."[19]

Another contributing factor to the dispute is the Comcast and NBCUniversal merger. On December 8, 2010 in a letter to the FCC, the New America Foundation wrote to the FCC stating that, "Because this dispute arose shortly after Level 3 signed a deal with Netflix to transmit Netflix content, regulators should examine Comcast’s motives closely. Netflix competes directly with Comcast’s cable TV programming offerings. In fact, over the past two quarters, cable has lost an increasing number of subscribers, and a number of those consumers have substituted Netflix streaming video service for the cable service they have eliminated. It requires little imagination to view Comcast’s behavior as an attempt to raise the distribution costs for Netflix and thus force that competitor to pass these new expenses onto consumers in the form of higher prices."[18]

On December 16, 2010 Level 3 Communications CEO, James Q. Crowe, submitted a letter to the FCC regarding the ongoing dispute between his company and Comcast. In the letter he stated, "The question, quite simply, is whether Comcast and other residential broadband Internet service providers should be allowed to use their dominant control over access to their subscribers' eyes and ears in order to coerce payments from broadband backbone and independent content providers."[20]

On December 17, 2010, Jeff Storey, President and COO of Level 3 Communications wrote a letter to Neil Smit, President of Comcast. In it he wrote, "Last night and today, in direct violation of our Non-disclosure agreement, Comcast disclosed the details of our discussions to the FCC, and publicly disclosed those discussions in a blog post written by John Schanz. This breach of our agreement is exacerbated by the fact that Comcast's portrayal of our discussions is factually incorrect."

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/25/us-eg-idUSTRE74O72L20110525

 

 

Zuckerberg, the 27-year-old entrepreneur who created the social network with 500 million users around the world, was greeted like a rock star during a question-and-answer session on Wednesday and praised for creating a tool that helped touch off democracy movements in the Arab world.

 

"People tell me on the one hand 'it's great you played such a big role in the Arab spring, but it's also kind of scary because you enable all this sharing and collect information on people'," said Zuckerberg, who was clad in a T-shirt and jeans.

 

"But it's hard to have one without the other .... You can't isolate some things you like about the Internet and control other things that you don't."

Schmidt sounded a similar note earlier when he told the assembly: "Technology will move faster than governments, so don't legislate before you understand the consequences."