Where the AI Domain Became a Moneymaker

So too is .ai–but not where we would expect.

An AI Domain

Like .us is the unique web address ending for the United States and .uk for the United Kingdom, Anguilla was assigned the .ai in its URL. Because the year was 1995, the designation was relatively meaningless. Now it is a huge moneymaker. The $700,000 that a tech magnate spent for you.ai was a small slice of the $32 million they raised in 2023. As a British Overseas Territory with just 16,000 people, Anguilla needed to diversify its tourism dominated economy. They never imagined that a domain name could do it.

Anguilla is a small dot in the Caribbean:

Domain names are now a part of a universal language that originated during the 1980s. At first, when computers had to communicate with each other, they used unmanageable strings of numbers and unique “languages.” The URLs and domain names we use today were much more functional and the reason Anguilla has .ai.

Our Bottom Line: Standardization

Looking back to 18th century France, you can see why all of us need standardization. The size of a pint could have varied by 20% between villages. And that was just one metric. Imagine dealing with many when buying and selling merchandise.

It helped the market considerably when two scientists defined the size of a meter during the 1790s by calculating the distance from the North Pole to the Equator and dividing it by 10 million. Once they knew the size of a meter, they said the kilogram was “a cubic decimeter of rainwater at 4 degrees Celsius.” One result was a platinum kilogram cylinder. But the bigger impact was the standardization of a wide array of weights and measures.

Today in the U.S., NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is the place to go for a measurement standard. Whether you want to know the duration of a second or the length of an inch, NIST has it.

We could say that NIST returns us to the URL and the standard way we communicate online. Through standardization, Anguilla could benefit from a market in domain names.

My sources and more: Thanks to the BBC’s World Business Report podcast for alerting me to the AI domain bonanza. From there, the BBC and Business Insider and the IMF had more detail. Then, for URL’s origins, I recommend this Cloudflare site and its links to their handy primer.

Please note that several of today’s sentences were in a past econlife post.