It might seem hypocritical for a company like Akamai to preach about green content delivery networks (CDNs), while accusing others of greenwashing, when Akamai CDNs are significant power-guzzlers, but the CDN heavyweight can’t be faulted for trying to educate the world to improve on its own fundamental flaws. Akamai had several representatives at the recent Streaming Media East conference in Boston, USA, including its director of corporate sustainability. The company took issue with marketing departments that make wild claims about 50% energy savings through more efficient compression techniques, while ignoring the reality that increased compression complexity at the decode side might increase energy consumption by 10%. Scaled by millions of users, each adding gigabytes of data to…