It pays to be a small island in the Caribbean named Anguilla, who had the good fortune to be awarded the .ai internet domain name, which is helping it to rake in the moolah!
First a little primer on how internet domain names were created and handed out.
Back in 1988 the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN for short, began assigning two-letter domains for every country. For example, Mexico received .mx and Spain was given .es which I’m guessing stands for Espanol.
Anguilla received .ai, which wasn’t a big deal until the country decided to capitalize on their good domain fortune and began selling the .ai domain name in 1995 to residents of Anguilla, but registration opened to foreigners in 2011.
Last year Anguilla brought in $32 million dollars, which is more than 10 percent of its G.D.P., from companies registering the .ai domain name.
The .ai domain name typically costs $139 for the first year, then goes up to $179 to renew, but you can usually find a discounted deal and be able to pick up a .ai domain name for as low as $59 dollars for the first year.
This isn’t the first time there’s been a run on popular domain names. All you have to do is remember back a few years when the .tv internet domain name was popular. The tv domain name is the Internet country code top-level domain for Tuvalu
According to The Commonwealth, “Tuvalu is an island country in the west-central Pacific Ocean. It sits about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Its neighbors include Kiribati, to the north, and Fiji, to the south. It is made up of a chain of 9 small coral islands.”
For a while the .io internet domain name was all the rage, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why anyone ever thought that was a cool name. The .io internet domain name belongs to Mauritius, which is a subtropical island country in the Indian Ocean, just over 1,130 kilometers east of Madagascar, off the south-eastern coast of Africa.
The .io internet domain name has become a generic domain that is popular in the tech world since IO or I/O means input/output in computer science. Again, I don’t get the appeal, but to each their own opinions.
Here’s an idea: for the next internet fad we should all create our own country, register a top-level internet domain name for that made up country, and begin selling our domain names for hundreds of dollars per domain to monetize the latest fad just like Anguilla has. What could possibly go wrong?
Anguilla: The small Caribbean island making a fortune from artificial intelligence