A lot of corporations use Akamai, Microsoft included -- http://www.akamai.com/html/customers/customer_list.html. Interesting enough, the only name missing from that list? Google.

This is not really surprising. Infrastructure is a key competitive advantage of Google, and they prefer to build their own stuff (including CDNs) instead of outsourcing it.

Yes, so the combination of Google + Akamai would be big enough to trigger anti-trust concerns, I would imagine.

Given that Google is barely in the infrastructure market (they mostly just have a ton for their own uses), I don't see how Google + Akamai would be any less competitive than Akamai on its own.

I guess there could be some issues since this makes Google's competitors in other markets reliant on them, but from a "too much good infrastructure in one company" standpoint, I don't see how there would be anti-trust concerns.

So why would they want to buy Akamai?

Probably to get into the CDN business. Making the web faster is one of Google's strategic goals, and they try to achieve it by many different means.

Google is essentially its own CDN: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/03/18/googl...

Why would they want to make other sites on the web faster?

Google has always wanted to make web faster. See http://code.google.com/speed/articles/ . And I'm sure you know about various Google tools (including Chrome) that try to speed up web.

They rely very heavily on web, and it's absolutely important for them to speed up web for people to keep moving away from native.