No I've disabled all of that. It's literally sucking down updates at the maximum capacity of the internet link. Previously the behaviour was to do this, but when the connection was active with other stuff it would throttle the updates back.
If you have a decent router (I have a Mikrotik; DD-WRT or such should work too) you can bucket all Akamai traffic into a low-priority queue. I posted an IP list elsewhere in this story.
It still has some issues when multiple machines download the same update, maybe this is when you home sysadmins could start running a caching server?