In 1988 the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority distributed two-letter domains for each country. For Spain .es, to Mexico .mx, .uk for the United Kingdom. Anguilla didn’t know it, but she was lucky to be granted .ai. Almost 40 years later, the rise of artificial intelligence has benefited this island, which has the domain that coincides with the English acronym for this technology. More and more companies, large and small, want to make specialized sites with AI and use its acronyms on the web, but they have to pay to do so. Anguilla’s luck turned into fortune, as these investments now represent a third of the government’s income in this small British territory located about 250 kilometers from Puerto Rico.
The blue sea beaches, white sand and coral reefs are the main attractions of this island, which depends largely on tourism. It was like this until at the end of 2020 the first hint of a new business arrived: the first sale of the most expensive domain on the island, the portal, occurred. expert.ai, in exchange for 95,000 euros. However, the real luck began on November 30, 2022, the date of the launch of ChatGPT and when purchases of domains with that same ending skyrocketed. Just five months later, sales had increased almost four times, Vince Cate, who manages records for the Anguilla government, tells EL PAÍS. “We already represent approximately a third of the government budget,” he adds.
Each government manages the fees and duration of the domains, explains Gonzalo de la Cruz, from Web Specialists. In Spain, the cost of each .es ranges from approximately one to 10 euros and is renewed every year. Anguilla has earned three million dollars just last January (about 2,700,000 euros), but Cate estimates that the figure will double when they are due for renewal. “We make domains for two years, so all our money now is new domains,” he notes. “If we maintain this level of three million per month for new domains, when renewals come into effect in a year’s time, we will jump to six million per month.”
Some startups artificial intelligence that have acquired pages with this domain are stability.ai and character.ai. Larger companies like Google, Meta and X (formerly Twitter) have had to leave money in this territory to create sites with artificial intelligence and so will companies that want to incorporate it into their websites in the future. In 2023, more than 200,000 registrations were recorded.
In addition to tourism, income in Anguilla comes from banking offshore and fishing. In 2020, its GDP was estimated at more than 275 million euros due to United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, long before the rise of artificial intelligence began. For this small territory with a population of around 16,000 inhabitants, the level of income generated by the sale of domains is very significant. If registrations continue to grow, Cate predicts, they could reach up to 72 million by 2025.
Invest in .ai domains
Before it became fashionable and even long before the arrival of ChatGPT, there was already a pioneer in acquiring pages with .ai. Igor Gabrielan has been a fan of artificial intelligence and robots since he was little, but it was not until 2011, when registration was opened for foreigners, that he began to buy domains with .ai and now he owns 750 pages to sell. However, it has not yielded the results he expected. “Despite the large amount of jewelry in my portfolio, large companies did not contact me,” Gabrielan tells EL PAÍS. His biggest sale netted him $50,000 in exchange for portal.ai.
Only one domain in Spanish appears in the Gabrielan catalog: friend.ai. “I haven’t heard of big Spanish domains,” she says. The domain with the Spanish acronym for artificial intelligence .ia is not assigned to any country.
The most popular domain extensions
The case of Anguilla is not the first. In 1994, Chris Clark purchased the domain pizza.com for 20 dollars and in 2008 he sold it for 2.6 million. In 2000, Tuvalu, a tiny Polynesian country in the South Pacific, sold another of the most popular and coveted domains for $50 million, due to its correspondence with television channels: .tv. A particular story is that of .amazon, since the eight countries of the Amazon basin demanded to have control of the domain. However, ICANN granted that coveted .amazon to the multinational internet sales company of the same name run by Jeff Bezos.
Cate compares the case of TV with that of her own island, although she highlights the nuances. Tuvalu has long worked with business partners for .tv domain licenses, while Anguilla handles registrations itself. “We’re doing it locally, so the government gets almost all the money.” For his part, investor Gabrielan is confident that the growth trend of artificial intelligence will continue, as well as the purchase of the coveted .ai.
- .COM At first, the .com extension was intended for companies. This changed in the 90s. Now anyone can register a .com domain without being geographically tied to a specific area.
- .CN The size of China is not surprising considering its territorial and population size and its rapidly growing economy.
- .OF It means Deutschland and is the domain extension of Germany. It was the first country extension to exceed one million registrations.
- .NET As it means “network”, it was initially intended for organizations related to network technologies. It is one of the first classic extensions, introduced in 1985.
- .UK It is the UK extension, which was launched in 1985 and is currently used by businesses, charities and individuals.
- .ORG It stands for organization and is one of the classic domain extensions and was introduced in 1985. It was intended for non-commercial organizations with international users, now it is used by charities, healthcare providers and cultural foundations, among others.
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