Dueling lawsuits concern CDN users

Once the high-flying darlings of the Internet boom, content delivery networks have sunk into a morass of complicated legal tanglings that has cast a shadow over the market and created anxiety among customers.

CDN market leader Akamai fired the initial volley in September 2000 of what has become an increasingly heated battle with competitors Digital Island and Speedera. Now, in addition to accusing Speedera of patent infringement, Akamai says the company illegally hacked into its database of customer performance figures and is engaged in a he-said-she-said battle with Digital Island as each company tries to turn off the other's service.

Customers find the wrangling unsettling.

"Most of our time should be focused on running our businesses and these [legal issues] are distractions to that," says one Akamai customer who asked not to be named. "As if worrying about whether a business is going to stay in business wasn't enough, now we've got this."

It's a convoluted situation that appears no closer to a resolution than when the first lawsuit was filed. While most customers do not appear concerned their service might be shut down soon, they say they are watching the legal maneuvering closely and consider the situation an annoyance.

"I'm sure it's distracting them and that's frustrating," says a Speedera customer who asked not to be identified. "It would be nice if they could just concentrate on business. But in the end, we'll stay with a CDN if it makes sense from a cost [and performance] perspective."

Patent infringement lawsuits are hardly unusual in the tech sector, where intellectual property is a key asset. Last month, for example, Hewlett-Packard sued EMC for patent infringement just months after EMC traded infringement claims with Hitachi Data Systems.

The issue within the CDN market, though, is the protracted and increasingly nasty nature of the proceedings, analysts say.

"In many cases, these suits end up being much ado about nothing. When all is said and done there is either some sort of settlement or some modification of behavior and you move on," says Rob Batchelder, a research director at Gartner. "But when PR agencies are saying, 'I'm going to shut these guys down' and then the countersuit flies and says, 'I'm going to shut those guys down' and they're asking for injunctions, that's when the lawyers have taken over and started running the company."

What's more, the complex nature of the CDN patent disputes make it difficult for customers to understand what the legal fighting is about and which companies might be vulnerable.

The saga started when Akamai sued Digital Island, claiming infringement of its patent that covers technology involving renaming URLs to join a CDN host name to a domain name and path to direct content requests to edge caching servers.

Digital Island fired back with a lawsuit, accusing Akamai of infringing on its patent that covers ways to track data to ensure the freshest information is delivered to Web sites and that duplicate information is not stored in its caches.