The Tropical Island With the Hot Domain Name

A tiny island in the Caribbean is now sitting on a digital treasure. From a report: Anguilla, a tropical British territory, is known for its coral reefs and white sand beaches. Since the 1990s, however, it's also been in charge of assigning internet addresses that end in .ai to residents and businesses looking to register websites. It was one of hundreds of country-specific domain names and easy to overlook -- until recently. Stability.ai, Elon Musk's X.ai and Character.ai are just a few of the hot artificial intelligence startups that have snapped up the .ai domain assigned to the islands and cays that comprise Anguilla. Plenty of tech giants have their own web addresses ending in .ai as well: Google.ai and Facebook.ai route visitors to their company's AI-focused webpages and Microsoft.ai shows off the company's Azure AI services.

The total number of registrations of sites ending with these two letters has effectively doubled in the past year to 287,432, according to Vince Cate, who for decades has managed the .ai domain for Anguilla. Cate estimates Anguilla will bring in as much as $30 million in domain-registration fees for 2023. Once one of the many obscure top-level domains assigned to countries and territories, .ai websites experienced a slow but steady increase in demand in recent years. But the sudden spike in .ai domains nine months ago highlights the broader frenzy around artificial intelligence and its ripple effects throughout the global economy. Since ChatGPT launched, a growing number of tech companies have raced to raise billions in capital, scoop up engineering talent and secure powerful but increasingly scarce chips. A domain may sound less essential, but for an industry obsessed with clever branding, the right name can be everything. "Since November 30, things are very different here," Cate said, referring to the date when ChatGPT launched publicly.

.blockchain

[bugs2squash]

meanwhile the tiny island of Blockchainia has been trying to live down the shame of its TLD.

Re:

[Geoffrey.landis]

You know, if British Columbia would just petition ICANN for their own top level domain, they might just be able to make some cash before the blockchain/bitcoin pyramid collapses...

Ontario

[Roger W Moore]

Ontario works better though: ohcome.on, offand.on, onand.on, oni.on, electr.on etc. Much more flexible.

Island of Buzzwordia

[Tablizer]

Is there a small chain of islands I can buy and make each an "independent nation" with the IT Fad of the Month?: Microservicia, Cryptoia, Nodeai, Qbitia, Mobilefirstia, Rustia, Bigdataia, GPTia, GTPia*, Cloudia, Edgia, Movefastandbreakia, etc. When I run out of islands I'll rename the oldest "nation" and reuse it for the next fad.

* For dyslexic web surfers

Re:

[NoWayNoShapeNoForm]

meanwhile the tiny island of Blockchainia has been trying to live down the shame of its TLD.

You mean .blo ?

Re:

[dohzer]

Are you predicting that "X" will have a similar shameful fate? Who'd have thought it!

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

.ai names and email addresses used to be run very informally. At one point a friend of mine's email address was $@ai. He didn't use it much though because too many mailers rejected it as invalid (it's not).

Nice, but...

[mspohr]

It seems that when you have companies with no connection to the actual physical location using it to sell their product that this is a corruption of the intent of these suffixes.
Of course, the entire internet is so corrupted by commercial abuse that this seems a minor niggle at this point in time.

Re:

[Calydor]

That discussion came and went with .it and .to decades ago.

Re:

[MeNeXT]

The sad part is when you have companies trying to convince you that .co is for company and that you should not block that domain from sending you scams/spam emails.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

And all software "should" be free, and people "should" care about privacy, and Linux "should" be on everybody's desktop.

Artificial Scarcity

[bill_mcgonigle]

More people would do ".google" style TLD's if it didn't require a ~$350K bribe to TPTB.

We don't live in the era of 16-meg machines running root zones anymore but the gravy train delivers on time.

Different governance incentives would be required to fix it in a centralized manner or a decentralized solution may gain critical mass.

I am surprised, though, that Musk hasn't paid it for .x yet.

Re:

[thegarbz]

the intent of these suffixes

The intent of the suffixes are nothing more than to funnel money to the the owner of said suffix. It is entirely up to the owner to decide what to do, and how high a bar to set for bringing money in, which is why some countries require you to register businesses to get a domain name and other's don't give a shit.

Re:

[Tablizer]

I think it's mostly a marketing thing: "See our newest and greatest chat-bot at BobsMagic.ai".

Just like Tuvalu twenty years ago

[_merlin]

This sounds like a repeat of when Tuvalu realised they could make bank from .tv domain names years ago.

Poor Tuvalu

[crunchygranola]

Its once hot TLD .tv is so passe now.

Sounds familiar

[posixively_true]

It reminds me of the .io TLD that was originally created for the British Indian Ocean Territory but then used for other unrelated purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]