10% of Anguilla's GDP is .ai domain fees (2023)
The domain fees now exceed $30M/year and population is under 16K, so call it $2K/year per capita.
Assuming average family size of 3.5, it's $7K/year per family.
That's real money, in exchange for doing nothing.
Anguilla has the top-level domain ".ai" by luck!
I'm kind of surprised that it is so significant, though I don't know the scale.. I went to Anguilla ~25yrs ago in a small sailing boat, lovely place and lovely people but as I understood it they were mainly into offshore banking, which should really dwarf domain registrations. Perhaps offshore banking has been cleaned up? I don't think they are big on tourism, they preferred to have fewer high cost hotels than lots of people visiting..
For example: - https://www.mozilla.ai/ - https://sdk.vercel.ai/ - https://x.ai/
(2023)
More recently lots of discussion:
.ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla
Cute TLDs as part of a company's brand always make me wonder ... is it just brand or is there any meat here?
It might not be a fair thing to think but I can't help but think of that.
If domain fees counted as "exports," they would be Anguilla's main export. In fact, that reclassification would nearly quadruple their exports.
Hot take but I think the .ai tld will become out of style, and even a turnoff in a few years. Especially if a lot of AI tools end up falling short of expectations, and make embarrassing mistakes. Users will be grow tired of hearing something is using AI
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This sort of news reminds me of that scene in The Big Short.
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