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Caribbean island Anguilla makes millions from AI boom thanks to .ai domain business
A lot of people are caught up in the generative AI madness of the last year or two, using it to apply a fresh coat of beige paint to their website copy, their emails, even their memes. In my group chat, one of the people shared a picture prompted by her network engineer husband: kangaroos shitting on toilets in the style of Dali. Safe to say, as someone who likes making new things, I'm not a fan.
But that's not what this is about. This is about money flowing, for once, in the right direction. Turns out, that .ai top-level domain is owned by Anguilla, the small Caribbean territory. They're currently making $3M per month on new domain registrations - assuming those hold, that's due to jump when the renewals hit.
What's old is new again. A quarter century ago, in amongst all the .com, .net, and .org domains that were the mainstays of the early net, another TLD started appearing: .nu. They were cheaper, they were fun, and if you got in early, you could get whatever you want, that might already be taken in the other TLDs.
.nu was the TLD domain of the tiny Pacific island of Niue, thousands of kilometres away from New Zealand. Or it was supposed to be: the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) assigned ownership to a Massachusetts-based non-profit, with the administration later transfered to a Swedish organization (apparently, "nu" is Swedish for "now", and the TLD had a lot of popularity in Nordic countries). Niue is suing, trying to get control, as well as compensation, estimating that it missed out in over a hundred million dollars in registrations, renewals, and so on, over the past quarter century.
They call it neo-colonialism. They've got a good argument.
But .ai is owned and administered by Anguilla, and directly benefitting the territory's ~15000 residents, so the money's flowing the right way. For once. And online, time is a flat circle. The .ai TLD has the same zip as .com in the 90s. Here we go again.