When you think of Anguilla, a British territory in the Caribbean, you think of white-sand beaches, a thriving local music scene, beer on the beach… you get the idea. But if you are a techie, you can only think of domain names that come with “.ai”.
Every country has its domain name, like “.in” for India. Anguilla is home to Internet addresses that end in “.ai” and this is as precious as real estate. Whenever any “.ai” name is registered or renewed — it could be AI start-ups or tech companies — the island collects a fee, which goes mostly to the government treasury.
As Bloomberg has pointed out, some of the popular intelligence start-ups with “.ai” domain assigned include Stability.ai, Elon Musk’s X.ai and Character.ai. Many tech giants have addresses ending in “.ai”, such as Google.ai and Facebook.ai (both route visitors to its AI-focused webpages) while Microsoft.ai takes users to its Azure AI services.
According to Vince Cate, who for decades has managed the “.ai” domain for Anguilla, the number of registrations of sites ending with “.ai” has doubled in the past year to 287,432 and it may bring in as much as $30 million in domain-registration fees for 2023.
To quite a large extent, the arrival of Facebook and Instagram apps or something like the Uber app has diminished the role of domain names because in an ever-changing tech world, people use the Internet differently and don’t necessarily have to type in a web address into a browser. But for brands, Internet addresses are still important, especially those with “.com”.
Popular domain names, including “.com” and “.org”, go back to the creation of ICANN, which began overseeing these legacy names and country and territory domains. The expansion of the Internet meant that ICANN created more digital real estate. Large companies have to buy up plenty of domain names to cover all kinds of variations, so that bad players don’t start using these addresses. Then there are speculators who own the rights to millions of domain names, hoping to resell them for big payouts.
