It is not every day that a technology vendor publicly takes a swing at a rival (at least not on the record). But that is exactly what Akamai CEO Tom Leighton did during a recent interview with The Register, in which he pushed back against Cloudflare’s framing of piracy enforcement as a potential free speech issue—and to reposition Akamai as a ‘rights-protection’ infrastructure provider. Weeks earlier, Cloudflare published a report warning of a “technical glass ceiling” that could stall AI growth and weaken cybersecurity if infrastructure providers are constrained by enforcement and legacy models. For broadcasters and rights holders battered by illegal IPTV services and social restreaming, this represents a power shift toward vendors in the delivery chain. At the…