Maaaaaybe. I see the CDNs bringing on compute & durablish storage at the edge. And id buy the argument theyre positioning themselves for the next round of “cloud” ala Lambda + DynamoDB.

But I strongly object to the capital characterization. Akamai, the gorilla in the CDN room, to looks to have capital expenditures of $200M or so for hardware/colo/etc. Cloudflare was spending $20-30M IIRC. Conversely Amazon “Cash capital expenditures were $6.7 billion, $10.1 billion, and $11.3 billion in 2016, 2017, and 2018, which primarily reflect additional capacity to support our fulfillment operations and additional investments in support of continued business growth in technology infrastructure (the majority of which is to support AWS).”

Money alone doesnt buy success but the CDN guys dont seem to showing up to the game yet. As youve noted I dont really see anyone else on the trajectory to general competition with the big three.

Disclaimer: Im a principal at AWS and have worked on CloudFront. All my comments are based on my personal reading of publicly available data like 10K & S1 filings.