The Internet's New Edge Builders

After building private backbones, content and cloud platforms are now moving closer to users. In doing so, they are taking on delivery roles once associated mainly with independent CDNs.

In The Internet’s New Builders I described how content and cloud platforms moved from buying international capacity to financing cables and operating private backbones. The same companies are now moving one layer closer to the user. Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance increasingly build or control delivery infrastructure that once would have been bought mainly from independent CDN providers. Traditional CDNs still carry important traffic, but they no longer define the whole delivery architecture.

Continue at source: The Internet’s New Edge Builders on RIPE Labs.

Originally published on RIPE Labs, 8 September 2026.