When you think about the internet, you may think about Google and that is good but it reality google is a search company and advertising company and many people use its services. However the internet is much more than google.

In an article in the Associated Press, in mid June a software bug at a major network provider briefly knocked dozens of financial institutions, airlines and other companies across the globe offline during peak business hours in Asia. In the afternoon when people are trying to do business, the internet was down in Asia and Australia. The company said there was a software bug on a service that protects customers against denial-of-service attacks. For the customers all traffic was rerouted in minutes, but it took 4 hours to restore the system.

The company is called Akamai Technologies and is based in Boston, Massachusetts and Akamai Technologies, Inc. is a global content delivery network^[2] (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services.^[3][4] Akamai’s Intelligent Edge Platform^[5] is one of the world’s largest distributed computing platforms. The company operates a network of servers around the world and rents out capacity on these servers to customers who want their websites to work faster by distributing content from locations near the user. When a user navigates to the URL of an Akamai customer, their browser is directed by Akamai’s domain name system^[6] to a proximal edge server that can serve the requested content. Akamai’s mapping system^[7] assigns each user to a proximal edge server using sophisticated algorithms^[8] such as stable matching and consistent hashing, enabling more reliable and faster web downloads. Further, Akamai implements DDoS mitigation and other security services^[9] in its edge server platform. (source Wikipedia).

Akamai’s customers includes more than 300 of the world’s largest banks, more than 30 airlines, more than 200 national government agencies and 825 retailers.

The article notes recent outages underscore how vital a small number of behind the scenes companies have become to running the internet.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, Akamai Technologies does not pay a dividend but one day it will likely because it has a solid base of customers who will renew their contracts every year. The reason why you may consider the company is think about plumbing in a house. No one buys a house for the plumbing, but someone supplies it to make the house work, whoever is the supplier maybe the company to invest in because all houses need plumbing. Sometimes the best investments are not the household names but who supplies the households. Research needs to be done before investing.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.