It's funny to see Akamai called a soulless corp. I still remember when they IPO'd in late 1999. It was viewed very positively in academic circles too.
Incidentally, I just looked at the stock price from back then and it was higher than it is now. Post dotcom bubble the stock never reached those highs again.
In those days a lot of the staff were MIT alumni and a ton of MIT students did internships there, thus the academia connection.
Ultimately it became a ball of mud/perl and fell behind contemporaries as CDN as a concept was commoditised. Their decline in market cap is directly attributable to this trend.
Meanwhile the 2 main newcomers used aggressive strategies to eat their lunch. On the web side CloudFlare offered free TLS termination and eventually basic CDN features for free. Something Akamai never acquired was the many-account scalability to do because their platform is so high touch.
Fastly attacked their entrenched video and media business, primarily with very efficient systems, compelling pricing and Varnish compatibility rather than ball of perl w/bespoke settings etc.
These days Akamai is the dinosaur and CloudFlare is pretty much the new incumbent, at least in terms of market share.
Compute at the edge is the new thing in town and Cloudflare and Fastly both have fairly high quality solutions while Akamai again falls behind.
Incidentally, I just looked at the stock price from back then and it was higher than it is now. Post dotcom bubble the stock never reached those highs again.