Is this stuff news to people? Having worked in that segment of industry, yes, that is how things largely work now, and that's largely how they've always worked,

Is this stuff news to people? Having worked in that segment of industry, yes, that is how things largely work now, and that's largely how they've always worked, even if perhaps there's a bit more consolidation now (market factors do that somewhat automatically, if not always in the same direction). This may be my relative youth, but I don't really recall people complaining that Akamai or--well, I don't know as good an analog to the modern major cloud providers, but maybe, say, Equinix or Rackspace--handled so much of the internet back in the day. Cloudflare may have more of a consumer brand presence because they intentionally market that with their free plan, branded error pages (the "Intel Inside" of CDN services), and ancillary services (1.1.1.1 and their phone VPN), but it's not like the internet of yore was some decentralized collaboration of freeholder fiber owners running their little own 1-person ISP cum hosting provider. Maybe in the early, early, more academic and hobbyist days, but I don't think it's surprising that those were more of an anomalous landscape after the internet's birth than the norm.