.ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla | Hacker News Reader

.ai website registrations are a windfall for tiny Anguilla

spectrum.ieee.org

311 pointsheadalgorithm209 comments

> It’s about US $3 million per month. We do the domains for two years, and so all of our money now is new domains. And if we just stay at this level of $3 million per month for new domains, when the renewals kick in a year from now, we’ll just jump to $6 million per month.

Is it actually reasonable to expect a steady $3M of domain creation over such a long period of time? AI is really trendy right now so a lot of projects are sparkling up, and even more ideas of projects… and people buy domain names for all of these, even those they won't ever actually start to build.

I would bet many of these domains won't even be renewed, and I would guess that the number of newly created domains won't actually keep up for long.

tough to say but lots of trends didn't go away they just died down

.io never went away for tech

you'd think the mobile app development bubble would have popped 10 years ago but it just kept going despite not really delivering value to most people that feel that they need one

2020's .finance is still popping in the crypto space, notably many, maybe even most of those ideas do make revenue for the creator, in comparison to a random registration on a whim that sits in stasis forever

I can see the same for .ai domains

.io is simply the new .net, what you get when you can't get .com but don't want to rename. Although .io and .ai are really expensive so I wouldn't be surprised if something new comes up.

in my world that was true 10 years ago, except it wasnt a cop out: nobody needed .coms but nobody knew it yet because of prevailing wisdom

over here .xyz is the new .io and nobody cares about the tld that much at all

if you’re relying on users to type in your domain name, or SEO, or some form of legitimacy with an equally as antiquated crowd, you’ve already failed and need to scrap the idea

I only seem to see .xyz in the crypto space (and alphabet inc). Generally it's a crypto scam pushed at me in a twitter/x ad. What are some other players on the .xyz tld?

I've used .xyz because the domains go for a few cents per year. And then I moved away from them because it felt so unprofessional.

i've seen lots of devs using it for their personal blogs, i guess because it's cheap. personally, im excited to buy an .lol tonight!

.lol is overpriced and worse, can arbitrarily increase the price in the future. Using anything other than an ICANN-controld gTLD (com,net,org,etc.) or a ccTLD (be very careful about ones from countries other than your own) is a fool.

the domain i was looking at is $1.80/yr so im not upset at the price, and its just for silly personal stuff so if they increase price i could just switch to something else.

good to know about the risks of price hikes though!

First registration is $2 but any renewal is $20 after. A lot of first year domains use different pricing and they are charged differently I think by the TLD holders, so it's not just stupid marketing by like GoDaddy who hopes you don't transfer to another registrar after them taking a loss the first year and huge hike after

A lot of super cheap ones have expensive renewals.

“A fool” is beyond dramatic.

One of the lecturers at my faculty has his academic website on an .xyz domain.

Does he speak any Slavic languages? I know a Russian lecturer who does that in part because he considers it funny to use a TLD that looks similar to the obscene word "хуй".

That's a bit weird of an association. I'm Russian and хуй doesn't usually come to my mind when I see xyz.

> Does he speak any Slavic languages?

Well yes, but not one that uses the Cyrillic alphabet or has this word.

Singular data point, but I don't think I've ever seen a company that I would take seriously use .xyz.

Double data point here.

In fact, unless you're selling to techies, it's dubious to operate a US business on anything but .com.

Aussie here, we try to get both the .com and the .com.au (and now also the .au), because people will just use one or the other, regardless of what the link says.

I think opening up .au was criminal. Same as the .uk one.

Investor value at the cost of hurting small business by increasing cost or creating confusion.

I realize you're referring specifically to general .au, but I don't think the average person will think to try foo.au instead of foo.com.au and .com.au isn't opened up to my knowledge. The name must be derived from your registered Australian business (ACN or ABN).

I've had a .net.au since 1999 and the same rules apply there.

The domain does not have to be derived form anything, only associated (owned?) with an ABN/ACN. And the bar for registering an ABN is as low as signing up for an email account.

People in Australia use .com.au all the time, domain.au almost looks broken to my eye.

abc.xyz?

Alphabet is not a company most people interact with directly so their website address doesn't matter at all.

together.xyz, although they’re .ai now

A really big looming question is what will happen to all the .tv domains, which provide 95% of Tuvalu's GDP (similar to how .ai is for Anguilla). The island is getting warn away by rougher seas and the ocean level is rising thanks to climate change.

What happens when the island no longer exists? Does the country still exist? Should the .tv domain still exist?

When Yugoslavia broke up they shut down its TLD, but this would be .... different?

.su still exists.

According to this article I found, Tuvaluans are trying to maintain their statehood and maritime rights once they no longer have land. It's uncharted territory for the UN but it strikes me as pretty likely (plus it's a bad look to not throw a bone to a country that the rest of the world played a part in destroying).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/11/tuvalu-seeks-t...

My prediction is the TLD stays and revenues go to the entity that is the Tuvaluan government (probably based in Australia at that point)

Tuvalu is also working on a land reclamation project that is designed to keep at least some land above the projected storm surges beyond the year 2100.

They've also amended their constitution in an attempt to maintain statehood even if rising sea levels do overtake the island:

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/10/12/tuvalu-plans-for-i...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Tuvalu#The_cli...

I’m sure since it would no longer be a country TLD, you could easily say it’s a media TLD. Crisis averted. However, registrar responsibilities would be elsewhere. Google perhaps. Or maybe someone else. I’m sure that .tv is so ubiquitous that it falls under several categories.

That would be a possible solution but they would have to agree to change the rules for TLDs or make an exception, because right now the rules are very clear that only countries can have two letter TLDs.

Yes, and like previous countries that are no more, the TLDs still exist. We just need some international entity to keep processing the registrations.

* and the EU, and Antarctica (.aq)

Also `.gb`, which is an island.

Then you get into British Overseas Territories (like Anguilla!) and French Overseas Departments (e.g. Reunion). Are they countries? Sort of, but not really?

Even within the UK it's tricky. Is Scotland a country? I don't think so, but a lot of Scots do.

This is a myth. They did a study last decade that showed Tuvalu is actually gaining landmass.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-02-pacific-nation-bigger.html

The PM at the time took contention to the publication of that article, saying that there was no increase in actual habitable land.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190326140508/https://kmt.news/...

Yup. The study suggests that it's just the peaks getting higher, which means that even the peaks will become harder to build on as they become steeper.

Useful inhabitable landmass is the question I guess? If it's just the peaks of the island getting higher, then that land becomes increasingly hard to build on.

> which provide 95% of Tuvalu's GDP

Source? I've never seen this number before. I've seen 8.4% of government revenue, and ~1/12 of GNI but never 95% of GDP...

For what it's worth, I have found this source [0]: "The deal with a US firm called DotTV effectively trebled Tuvalu's national income."

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/business....

Soviet Union (.su) it's still around. Even if Tuvalu disappears (it won't) someone else would take care of the TLD.

В связи с геополитическими изменениями домен pos.su переименован в pos.ru

Kind of a stranger fart joke, what it says is that because of the geopolitical changes the domains will be renamed. But the first one can be read as "I'll piss" and the second one "I'll poop".

There is at least one landless sovereign entity at the moment[1], but they don't have a ccTLD as far as I know.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_...

Well, fuck.yu became fuck.me

Tuvalu is getting larger, not smaller. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

It's odd ICANN has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that domains would arbitrarily give some countries an extra form of income, profiting from people who could care less about the country it was created for. Why didn't ICANN just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?

ICANN does not pick the abbreviations. ISO does.

ISO3166-1 alpha-2 to be exact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2

It's odd ISO has such a control to effect an countries income just by choosing a good abbreviation. I doubt the creators of the DNS system had any idea that domains would arbitrarily give some countries an extra form of income, profiting from people who could care less about the country it was created for. Why didn't ISO just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?

ISO created the country codes in 1974, prior to the invention of DNS.

Haha, this is both informative and deadpan. Thanks. :)

This is what tech debt looks like when it’s middle aged and has kids of its own.

Surely some of these country codes have come about after the dawn of DNS.

I wonder if we'll see newly formed countries angling for names that will get valuable abbreviations

i get why people are downvoting this, because it is snarky, but i laughed so hard. so thanks for posting this, despite the hit to your internet points

The whole point of the ccTLDs is that ICANN doesn’t really have any control over their contents—they’re “sovereign soil”, so to speak, and each country can do whatever it wants with its namespace. Which brings us to the answer to your question:

> Why didn't ICANN just charge a flat fee for any string to resolve to an IP?

Because ICANN doesn’t control what strings resolve! They delegate to registries (by putting NS records in the root resolvers), and for ccTLDs it’s up to each country to set policy and infrastructure to taste. If anything, the existence of gTLDs (like .com) where policy is set internationally is the unusual aspect of this arrangement.

Think about the original TLDs, there was value in separating commercial, military, and government content. Unfortunately .gov is US government only and .mil is US military only. So each country would presumably want a .gov.[country-code] and .mil.[country-code] suffixes for those same reasons (and many do).

Opening up registration for non-citizens / non-residents is an option each country has. Some restrict registration more than others.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_d...

There's also an important angle that countries can set the terms of service for their ccTLD to match their laws. It's one way to ensure a country has some legislative and enforcement ability over their corner of the web.

Tuvalu (.tv), Libya (.ly), Anguilla (.ai). Matt of wordpress got ma.tt (Trinidad & Tobago). Some countries (eg, Canada) require some kind of residency. What other TLDs are special?

.io quite infamously

https://www.thewebmaster.com/archived/io-tld-top-level-domai...

I legit didn't realize that .io was a TLD for a country/state.

Also, that article is wild!

In the future, we'll have a coup in some country and it will cause web chaos just from the TLD issue. (I've seen first-hand how some countries handle their ccTLDs...)

> I legit didn't realize that .io was a TLD for a country/state.

All two-letter TLDs are. Now that you know the pattern, you'll be able to identify all the other ccTLDs as well.

For some definition of country/state that includes .eu and such...

Yeah, Country Code TLDs is a bit of a misnomer, it's more "regions and territories".

Lots of islands, lots of of countries with spotty international recognition, a couple countries that no longer exist (like the Soviet Union), and a couple "regions" (EU, Antarctic)

OK I know this sounds kind of shitty but hear me out for the sake of argument.

If there is some political issue and say .ai domains are taken over, what's stopping IANA from just taking over that TLD and moving the zone to some other entity? Most domains there are owned by international business and some IANA members might want to keep them running.

What would they gain with that?

Nothing, just some arbitration process that may or may not adjudicate against them.

There have been a few disputes around certain ccTLDs, in the end it's a mixture of political and commercial interests that need ad-hoc mediation in most cases.

It's a very biased article though.

i have a .af (afghanistan) domain that will expire next month. i can't renew it because the registrar isn't able to make contact with anyone at their noc since the US pulled out.

.cc (Cocos Island) was used most famously by Arduino.

.cx (Christmas Island) domains were relatively common some 20 years ago, iirc because of some dynamic DNS provider.

And of course .io is the ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean territories

I fully suspect .CX to see a resurgence as the short form for "customer experience" is really expanding quickly.

How many people would recall goatse every time they saw it though?

not many I suspect, but enough. :)

No-one said CX is about good customer experience, though. And then: who am I to judge what a "good experience" is anyway.

I see that as an absolute win. Your CX is so good you'll bend over for your client.

Time to see if goat.se has the classic images we all love and expect.

.cx was probably most famous for goatse.cx.

(For anyone who doesn't know -- don't go there. At least not while you're in public.)

Well, didn't want to mention that one. But I found the dynamic DNS service that I was thinking of; it was "ath.cx". These days it is operated by the same company that operates dyndns.org and homeip.net. That company is, wait for it...

Oracle.

I remember .cc being marketed as "the new .com" 20 years ago or so. Never did see many .cc domains.

Lots of shady stuff early 2000s were using .cc as well. Don't remember specifically what niche though.

> .cc (Cocos Island) was used most famously by Arduino.

IMO Arduino's use of the domain wasn't as famous as Creative Commons' use of the domain creativecommons.cc ... but Arduino is still at arduino.cc, while Creative Commons has moved to .org.

Western Samoa (.ws) briefly enjoyed fleeting popularity when SOAP was ushering in a golden age of enterprise astronauts...

.co (Colombia) is a fairly popular alternative to .com.

.fi (Finland) was used by crypto/web3 companies during the 2021-22 hype cycle because it associates with finance (as in DeFi = decentralized finance).

.is (Iceland) and .at (Austria) are English words and can be used for cleverish domains that form sentences in URLs, as in: this.is/amazing

.gy (Guyana) may have some life (grun.gy, lethar.gy ?)

Domain power combo: big.dk + ener.gy

> big.dk

At least I have found what I have expected on that domain.

Haha. There also exists .co.ck, for real.

I'm surprised sucks.co.ck is available. Seems like you could sell subdomains of that.. elon.sucks.co.ck, etc.

I'm not personally willing to gamble on the $500 price tag though

.ck has a special policy prohibiting any sort of profanity, and looks like you have to have an administrative contact in the country.

.co is a interesting case because there's also the convention of ".co.*". Is there a .co.co?

There's a .co.ck for commercial domains in the Cook Islands, such as google.co.ck.

Too bad there's no such thing as a rooster stud, otherwise "rent-a.co.ck" would be a great domain name.

Not sure what else I'd use it for though...

.tk was all the rage when I was younger, early 2000s something. You got a top level domain for free! Of course, they would just serve your webpage through a frameset with ads surrounding it unless you paid. But it rocked being able to say "visit my webpage matsemann.tk" instead of home.no.net/users/~matsemann/ (~ on Norwegian keyboard needs an alt+gr combo plus pressing space to show, and back in the days having to explain the direction of slashes also made it hard)

Except for https://tcl.tk/ of course!

Your direct link reminds me that many years ago, .tk was shadowbanned on reddit; you could see your post containing a .tk link, but no one else would. It might still be that way.

I understand the (arguable) necessity and the prolific scams, but it seemed cruel to broke teenagers.

OMG this really brings back some memories. I totally forgot about that .tk iframe thing. Wasn't it in the late 90s?

Was still a thing in the late 2000s, at least in my (european) internet bubble at the time.

This was also one of the only ways for a broke middle schooler without a credit card to get a cool "real" domain.

Combine it with dyndns, self-host some ancient-but-free bulletin-board software (Woltlab Burning Board may ring a bell for the European / German audience) after learning about this "Apache2" and "mod_php" thing and your small slice of internet with 10 users max is done. Good times. :D

Always used phpbb but when I discovered a nulled version of WBB in my script kddie days, heck was it a good time.

Yes, but since it has been operated by freenom, along with .ml, .ga, .gk, and .cf it's a real disaster.

There is an audio interview, linked on HN, in one of the comments I can’t find, about the crazy story of tk domains involving gun running and drug smuggling, freedom getting sued by Facebook for tk abuse and so on. It was very interesting to hear dotcom bust millionaire stories from a user here.

Have this instead “How a Tiny Pacific Island Became the Global Hub of Cybercrime”

https://m.slashdot.org/story/421307

> through a frameset with ads surrounding it unless you paid

Or used JavaScript tricks to hide the ads, or redirect the outer page to an ad-free URL. I know you could do the former on cjb.net, but perhaps .tk required the latter.

In the same vein as .tv there is the .fm (Federated States of Micronesia) for radio stations.

Also, .ws (Western Samoa), which was sold as "web site".

Seen a decent number of usages of .fm for podcasts.

Last.fm probably being the most famous example of a radio adjacent service using .fm

.it (Italy) for "IT/Information Technology"

IIRC it sort of has a residency requirement, but there are companies that will proxy your registration for you. More trouble than its worth to just not abuse the TLDs in this manner.

Many registrars offer a service where they provide a local contact who meets the residency requirements of your preferred domain name.

Not something to do lightly for an actively used domain name if you're an actual business, as it may establish presence in a jurisdiction you'd rather not be in; but it should be fine enough for personal use; worst case, you abandon the domain when it becomes an issue and maybe avoid travel to that country.

.rs (Serbia) for Rust projects.

Afghanistan (.af)

Does anybody have one of these? I tried to register one once and the registrar just wouldn't let me.

Call me crazy, but I can't imagine the Taliban regime would be cool with English-speaking entities using their ccTLD for the "AF" meme.

https://queer.af/about

It’s still up, but it’s going down real soon.

.cat (Catalunya) is frequently used by fans of the animal Cat, but it's for websites that "have a significant amount of contents in Catalan" - https://domini.cat/en/faqs/

.nu (Niue) was originally owned by a Niue non-profit in Massachusetts, US, but was later transferred into Swedish ownership as "nu" means "now" in Swedish and lots of websites in Sweden were using it.

Same thing in The Netherlands, it has the same meaning. There was a popular travel blog service named waarbenjij.nu, (meaning whereareyou now)

> the animal Cat

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,

An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;

Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses

Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,

A singular development of cat communications

That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection

For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;

You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.

And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,

It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display

Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.

And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,

I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

Notion for some reason still use Somalia (.so)

And that was a big problem for them a couple of years ago.

My personal website and blog[0] makes use of the Liechtenstein .li TLD. That makes it special (for me). We also use .co[1] at my startup since someone is squatting our .com

0: https://omarkama.li

1: https://monitoro.co

I own a .pm domain, for Saint Pierre et Miquelon, I think you need to be European.

.gg is a bit more niche but I see it occasionally for gaming related sites (Guernsey)

Oh yeah that's a good one, it's become the TLD of choice for at least part of competitive gaming. Particularly melee.gg, but also magic.gg, racetime.gg, maxroll.gg, etc.

discord.gg as well

Montenegro: .me

I assumed it was a domain created for personal sites, but it turns out its for the country.

It is explicitly marketed for personal sites though and not limited to users in Montenegro (since 2008): https://domain.me/

There's the usual second level domains .co.me, .net.me, .org.me, .gov.me etc. reserved for actual Montenegrin entities.

.ie, Ireland.

Why would anyone want an Internet Explorer domain?

Cameroon .cm is a good one. Close to a typo squat like .co

My personal site uses .id so the site can match my username everywhere: https://xavd.id

I'm really quite fond of it. It's the Indonesian TLD, but there aren't residency requirements (for top-level domains). I've got the relevant `.com`s as a fallback, but I hope this sticks around without drama.

.fm for radio and music related sites (Federated States of Micronesia)

.IT is the Italian ccTLD /. One would think it would be a slam-dunk for, y'know, IT companies; but the infamous Italian bureaucratic sentiment ensured that registrations were, for decades, limited to Italy-based businesses (at one point, even individuals were barred....). I don't know if it's still the case.

In a similar vein, Tuvalu finally joined the UN in 2000 after monetizing the .tv domain in 1998. It could not afford the membership previously.

Island sells web address to buy UN membership [0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/business....

Huh, it's strange that UN membership costs money.

How else would they fund it?

The UN has a number of programs which cost money; even just the maintenance of the building and staff costs money. There is a formula they use to "harmonize" contributions by population, gdp etc.

From the documents, it looks like Tuvalu contributes $ 2,500 p/y to the Working Capital Fund (i.e. reserves) and about $ 40,000 p/y to the regular budget (which is periodically modified and approved depending on needs of the various programs, and collected yearly from member countries, with unspent leftovers returned to them).

If these look like paltry sums, it's because they are. No wonder the Gates Foundation is squarely in the top-20 UN donors.

For comparison, some of the biggest contributors are the US (55m to Working Capital Fund, 750m to yearly budget), China (38m and 500m) and Japan (20m and 220m), although the highest per-capita contributions amoung sizeable countries are Norway and Sweden.

Everyone should have learned from .io that this is risky. Thought after the fallout from that there seemed to be a trend away from those ccTLDs and back to traditional ones and then of course the big release of so many new ones that gave lots of options, the ccTLDs as 'trendy' shouldn't be a thing anymore.

I'm always surprised when I see people building businesses on any of the ccTLDs. The only one I would use is .ca, but that's because I'm from Canada.

There are no guarantees with ccTLDs and any problems that come up might be exacerbated by language and cultural barriers. Regardless, I have the .co, .me, and .io that match my best .com domain even though I'll never use them. I'd do the same for .ai, but it's too expensive.

Even the new gTLDs are iffy depending on your risk tolerance. In my opinion, the only truly "safe" domains since ICANN removed most price controls [1] are .com and .net. Also, many of the new gTLD registries are owned by Ethos Capital via Identity Digital [2] (Donuts + Afilias).

> In January 2021, Ethos Capital acquired Donuts after their failed bid to gain control over the .org internet domain. [3]

Similar to ccTLDs, I'd only register domains on many of the new gTLDs for brand protection and wouldn't use them or rely on them.

I wouldn't say to never use those TLDs, but I would use a strategy that only relies on them for shortening URLs and redirecting traffic to top tier TLDs. For example:

    somecompany.balloons --> somecompanyballoons.com

And never let a non-premium new gTLD registration lapse if there's a chance you want to use it. AFAIK, domains can't be reclassified as premium while they're registered, but they can, and do, get reclassified after expiration.

1. https://domainnamewire.com/2019/06/30/domain-overseer-lifts-...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Digital

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donuts_(company)

I'd pick a ccTLD of a stable country over a nuTLD any day.

$3M per month, 15k residents, so roughly $200 per resident per month. Not bad.

"They’ve eliminated property taxes on residential buildings."

What a great thing for the country.

> What a great thing for the country.

Not necessarily. The risk with any kind of external subsidy is that it may not last forever. Imagine if that happened wherever you live. Once everyone's accustomed to $0 in property tax, what would happen if you suddenly had to put those taxes back in place? Would it stall the economy if the tax burden was high enough?

IMHO, the best way to deal with windfall money like that is to put it into a wealth fund or use it to build infrastructure. That way you don't become dependent on it and, if the money stops flowing after a while, you at least have some long term infrastructure to show for it.

As per the article, the first thing they did was not the elimination of the tax, but paying off debts.

Which is lasting. Arguably more so than a trust fund.

Beyond the risk associated with using a ccTLD, I've noticed that several Fortune 100 companies are now outright blocking .ai domains because they host content believed to potentially leak intellectual property, especially within the financial services industry. This is something to consider if you're launching a new product targeting such customers and want to avoid having architects/engineers go through the hassle of requesting that your site be added to an allowlist.

It sounds plausible, but also extremely naive. Is there any substance to this, or is it just a rumor?

I've said it before [0-4], I'll say it again -- mind your TLD. They have about as much control and influence over your traffic as a VPN, except even your users are at their mercy. Do not choose a TLD based on trends.

[0]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1686148772831846402 "TLDs are almost as bad as VPNs in terms of the magnitude of trust you need to commit to another entity for your online survival. Always do thorough research before choosing a TLD."

[1]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1613228573015568386 "TLD registries set their own prices. PS: .io is operated by Indian Ocean Territory. Then, "In 2017, a researcher managed to take control of four of the seven authoritative name servers for the .io domain.""

[2]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1688603657716248576 "Every company I consult with, I advise them to choose TLDs like you would email providers, web hosts, VPNs, and ISPs! They carry heavy risks."

[3]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/900740252498665472 "(Note the 1500% increase in price for the .hosting TLD.)"

[4]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1598092186024755200 "Many TLDs are unregulated and put your business at risk"

Basing your entire business on a ccTLD is very risky. All it takes is a coup and boom you’re toast.

It may be a good choice if it is your local ccTLD, your country is fairly stable and your customers are fine with it.

For example .de is the perfect choice if you are a German company servicing primarily the German market.

Most businesses own their brand name under at least a few TLD's. It's fairly easy to shift customers over from yourbrand.com to yourbrand.org.

And you'd be smart to have your mobile app fall back to a backup domain if your main domain is uncontactable.

How often does that happen?

I've been working with domain registrars since 2004, and while I haven't really kept current on the latest trends I do know that our national ccTLD has very good conflict arbitration.

So my suggestion is always to get a TLD where you feel safe that they can help resolve any potential conflicts that might arise.

At least for important networking stuff, your marketing can be on .ai or whatever is buzzing at the moment.

I would have said to just use dot-org once upon at time, but then this happened: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-...

In the meantime, at least thepiratebay.org is still up... and now that I think of it, it's a good canary for the integrity of dot-org.

It is blocked on a provider level by some jurisdictions, though. This is what I see in .nl:

https://imgur.com/a/4A0PsHh

Translated title is: > This page has been made inaccessible by court order.

So I think the integrity of .org is of little consequence if traffic to it gets blocked on provider level.

That's an issue with your country and one that you can easily work around by e.g. running your own recursive resolver or using one that does not care about your countries orders.

TLDs kicking out unsavory websites is global and does not have any automated workarounds.

we actually used an .ai domain and one night, round 11pm it stopped pointing to us. To add a record, the registrar at AI literally had a spreadsheet which upserts all the records when they upload it, and someone fat-fingered the row with our domain. It took the whole night to get a hold of the one person on that island who could fix it. This was about 5 years ago, maybe they've gotten better.

You're definitely right, though .ai refers to a British territory and therefore is on the more stable end politically. (though see .io for a counterexample; the TLD was sold off to a private company)

There are plenty of worse choices, like using .la (Laos) for Los Angeles, .dj (Djibouti) for DJ-related sites, or (particularly prevalent on HN) .rs (Serbia) for anything related to the Rust language.

I think the most obvious, "This isn't going to work out," was queer.af losing their domain name, because the Taliban doesn't take kindly to queer folk.

I wish TLDs were decentralized so that goofy stuff like this would never happen. It (having companies and entities own and control TLDs) never should have happened in the first place.

I don't think it's a bad thing that a country has control over it's TLD. Using `.ai` is overloading the proper use case for that TLD.

Countries should have their own TLDs, but they should be more obvious and/or not available to the public.

ccTLDs were obvious until ICANN opened the floodgates to new gTLDs.

What would you consider to be a “safe” TLD? I imagine most ccTLDs are off the table, and even a lot of the gTLDs are shady, so .com/.org/.net?

Can't help but notice the minimalism of the DataHaven.net web site [0] (the company that handles the sales). Obviously they don't need it as a storefront, and yet it contrasts so much with how modern business operate. Just recently there was an "Ask HN" about it [1] ("Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?").

[0] http://datahaven.net/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39154380

My cue to mention http://ai which used to link to the registrar

http://ai./ still works and links to registrar services

http://ai works on a desktop browser and opens the same page - this is the page it used to open - https://web.archive.org/web/20220316164406/http://ai/

Not for me, this might be a quirk with Chrome on AT&T using the router's DNS. It does a dns lookup for ai.attlocal.net to find it on the network, instead of appending the trailing dot like it should.

How does this work? Are there other domains like this? I've never seen it before!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain#Dotless_domai...

I'm fairly certain "www.canon" resolved to Canon's website at some point (where "some point" is the introduction of domain, 2015), and was not just a hypothetical address:

- https://icannwiki.org/.canon

- https://domainnamewire.com/2010/03/17/canon-why-would-you-wa...

A TLD is just a namespace. Think of it like subdomains such as blog.yoursite.com

com is a top level domain, yoursite.com is a domain, and blog.yoursite.com is a subdomain. All of these can have their own DNS records that resolve to things. Typically they don't unless it redirects to something like nic.tld or something.

Conceptually as a user there is not much difference between the topmost TLD, a domain within the TLD, and a "subdomain" (really, a "host") within a domain. Nor any other level under it.

The DNS root is .

Under the DNS root are the TLDs; com, net, org, and a bazillion other.

Then under those are domains. More or less. Some countries use for example co.tld instead of tld, and some use both.

Anyways, aside from things like glue records etc that the domain and tld owners have to concern themselves with, my claim is that for a user it is more or less the same.

If I tell you that my website is http://www.example.com/ then in theory you could do the following to resolve it:

- You don't know the IP of www.example.com so you have to find the Name Server for it.

- You don't know the NS of example.com so you decide that you should query the NS of com for it.

- You don't know the NS of com so you decide that you should query the DNS root . for it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_root_zone

https://root-servers.org/

So let's query a root server

  dig @198.41.0.4 com. NS

Command output with response and some tool specific stuff:

  ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> @198.41.0.4 com. NS
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 16618
  ;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 13, ADDITIONAL: 27
  ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
  
  ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
  ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;com.    IN NS
  
  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  com.   172800 IN NS e.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS i.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS f.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS g.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS h.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS l.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS c.gtld-servers.net.
  com.   172800 IN NS d.gtld-servers.net.
  
  ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
  e.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.12.94.30
  e.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:502:1ca1::30
  b.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.33.14.30
  b.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:231d::2:30
  j.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.48.79.30
  j.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:502:7094::30
  m.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.55.83.30
  m.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:501:b1f9::30
  i.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.43.172.30
  i.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:39c1::30
  f.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.35.51.30
  f.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:d414::30
  a.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.5.6.30
  a.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:a83e::2:30
  g.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.42.93.30
  g.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:eea3::30
  h.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.54.112.30
  h.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:502:8cc::30
  l.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.41.162.30
  l.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:500:d937::30
  k.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.52.178.30
  k.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:d2d::30
  c.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.26.92.30
  c.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:503:83eb::30
  d.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN A 192.31.80.30
  d.gtld-servers.net. 172800 IN AAAA 2001:500:856e::30
  
  ;; Query time: 58 msec
  ;; SERVER: 198.41.0.4#53(198.41.0.4)
  ;; WHEN: Tue Jan 30 22:38:10 CET 2024
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 828

Ok, and from that we can query one of the NS of com for example.com

  dig @192.12.94.30 example.com NS

Output:

  ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> @192.12.94.30 example.com NS
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4260
  ;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1
  ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
  
  ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
  ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;example.com.   IN NS
  
  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  example.com.  172800 IN NS a.iana-servers.net.
  example.com.  172800 IN NS b.iana-servers.net.
  
  ;; Query time: 54 msec
  ;; SERVER: 192.12.94.30#53(192.12.94.30)
  ;; WHEN: Tue Jan 30 22:38:49 CET 2024
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 88

And we can query the NS for example.com to find out the IP address of www.example.com

  dig @a.iana-servers.net. www.example.com A

(You can see I skipped a couple of steps in the interest of brevity here, as I am suddenly querying an NS by its DNS name a.iana-servers.net. directly instead of via an IP address. But if you like you could imagine that we take the same steps to resolve a.iana-servers.net. from the DNS root up.)

And we get the following output:

  ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> @a.iana-servers.net. www.example.com A
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 54009
  ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
  ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
  
  ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
  ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;www.example.com.  IN A
  
  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  www.example.com. 86400 IN A 93.184.216.34
  
  ;; Query time: 114 msec
  ;; SERVER: 199.43.135.53#53(199.43.135.53)
  ;; WHEN: Tue Jan 30 22:39:10 CET 2024
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 60

In reality most client devices will not resolve it from the root up. Instead, they will be told about local resolvers when they aquire DHCP lease on their local network, and they will ask those resolvers on the local network to resolve the domain, and they might do it either directly from cached values, or at least skipping a few steps because they already know which NS are in charge of which TLDs.

But what I am getting to is this:

We can ask the root servers for the NS for the TLD.

  dig @198.41.0.4 ai. NS

which gives us

  ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> @198.41.0.4 ai. NS
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 46879
  ;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 8
  ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
  
  ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
  ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;ai.    IN NS
  
  ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
  ai.   172800 IN NS anycastdns1-cz.nic.ai.
  ai.   172800 IN NS anycastdns2-cz.nic.ai.
  ai.   172800 IN NS pch.whois.ai.
  ai.   172800 IN NS a.lactld.org.
  
  ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
  anycastdns1-cz.nic.ai. 172800 IN A 185.28.194.194
  anycastdns2-cz.nic.ai. 172800 IN A 185.38.108.108
  anycastdns2-cz.nic.ai. 172800 IN AAAA 2a00:fea0:dead::beef
  pch.whois.ai.  172800 IN A 204.61.216.123
  pch.whois.ai.  172800 IN AAAA 2001:500:14:6123:ad::1
  a.lactld.org.  172800 IN A 200.0.68.10
  a.lactld.org.  172800 IN AAAA 2801:14:a000::10
  
  ;; Query time: 52 msec
  ;; SERVER: 198.41.0.4#53(198.41.0.4)
  ;; WHEN: Tue Jan 30 22:49:27 CET 2024
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 291

And we can ask one of those for an IP address for the ai tld itself.

  dig @204.61.216.123 ai. A

And in the case of the ai tld, the NS for the tld do indeed return an A record for the bare tld

  ; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> @204.61.216.123 ai. A
  ; (1 server found)
  ;; global options: +cmd
  ;; Got answer:
  ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 14414
  ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
  ;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available
  
  ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
  ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
  ;; QUESTION SECTION:
  ;ai.    IN A
  
  ;; ANSWER SECTION:
  ai.   3600 IN A 209.59.119.34
  
  ;; Query time: 3074 msec
  ;; SERVER: 204.61.216.123#53(204.61.216.123)
  ;; WHEN: Tue Jan 30 22:50:38 CET 2024
  ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 47

And there you have it. That's how it works.

You may have trouble on this with systemd-resolved on Linux, which is hard-coded to refuse to resolve TLDs with a single label. :-(

A few years ago I wrongly thought that the ai TLD no longer had an A record because of that. Grumble!

This is a great article. It's an interesting phenomenon. How did the `.tv` boom work out? Anyone know registration rates for that domain over time? We are in a big wave of AI hype so the registrations are going to be many for now...

"""

And it’s just part of the general budget—the government can use it however they want. But I’ve noticed that they’ve paid down some of their debt, which is pretty unusual. They’ve eliminated property taxes on residential buildings. So we’re doing well, I would say.

"""

A shame they don't manage that inflow of money particularly well. Instead of giving tax cuts they should treat it like Norway treats income from oil and make a sovereign wealth fund – oh well...

Right, "remove taxes because of domain sales!"...not a good long-term strategy

Yes, and since it's property taxes it also means that this money is redistributed to people already wealthy enough to own their house or apartment (and most probably those that others rent)…

When you're a small incompetent corrupt country, a sovereign wealth fund is the last thing you want. Like dumping gasoline on a fire. Whereas cutting taxes - well, it may not be optimal, but it's harder to corrupt, is transparent and publicly observable, and easy to implement.

Not following the phrasing: "Whereas cutting taxes - well, it may not be optimal, but it's harder to corrupt, is transparent and publicly observable, and easy to implement."

Cutting taxes is harder to corrupt? The removal of taxes is good because the country can't properly collect taxes in the first place?

Indeed. "Please pay us 100 rubles for house tax." "But house tax was abolished last year thanks to the AI revenues!" "Er..."

> The removal of taxes is good because the country can't properly collect taxes in the first place?

Sure. Look at Russia's infamous 'tax audits'. ("For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.") And then deadweight losses, overhead from dodging it, stuff being driven in to blackmarkets, manipulation of tax regs (the more complicated the better) to subsidize connected oligarchs... The more nominally powerful but incompetent a government is, the worse.

This is a surprisingly good argument that me as a Danish person in a well functioning society with almost no corruption forgets.

However, one could hope for a bit more ambition on these matters :)

Why would people tax themselves when they don’t need to?

I can recommend you to look into the Norwegian case and study general economics. There is a hole repository of knowledge you'd need in order to understand why taxation is important.

120k registrations * $30 = $3.6 million last year (minus fees). At the peak (July 2020) they did 140k in a single month.

https://domainnamestat.com/statistics/tld/tv-TLD_ID-1435

There seems to be significant domain squatting on .ai. I looked for a simple, non-obviously-AI-related word as a .ai domain a week ago, which was registered but listed as for sale, and the domain registrar suggested it was worth $4M.

That's more than the yearly sales Anguilla makes in total.

Many words and phrases I've looked for in the space are registered but listed as for sale. I suspect this means new sales will slow for Anguilla, and I wonder if as time passes and value drops, renewals will slow too.

Vince Cate, the domain manager referenced in the article, has a unique and rich history of his own: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Cate

Domain registration used to be free until like 1995 or so. Crazy what it has become.

Funny...reminds me of how the Island State of Tuvalu really benefited from the .tv domain.

I just want to point out that the huge expansion of TLDs has really affected the prices of domains in the aftermarket. This wasn't true immediately, but average users are used to them now, so if your domain ends with .tech or .plus or .cool or whatever, it doesn't have any sort of non-professional stigma it once had. And there are still plenty of good 'ol .com names still available.

You can have an AI company with any sort of domain now. No one really cares. I bet much of the .ai surge is due to domain squatters hoping for a windfall. It's not going to happen.

I have a one-word, relevant .ai domain that I'm hoping to do something with, but I'd also be open to any sort of offer as I'm short of money right now. So I posted it for sale on various sites and gotten zero interest in it.

The days of rare, in-demand domains like sales.com or something are long gone. In fact, most serious companies want a unique name to build a brand. Which is a better long-term name, intelligent.ai or logique.com?

I'm glad this happened. Means there's less incentive for domain-squatting.

It's interesting that the AI TLD has an A record and an HTTP server directly on the TLD: http://ai

This practice is forbidden on gTLDs, but no such rule exists for ccTLDs.

I had .im, .io domains et cetera. Seeing some crazy price increases I moved those to .net and .com. It’s not guaranteed but I believe it’s less likely that a generic domain will go bonkers in terms of cost overnight.

I wish some of these owners would use some of that money to prevent squatting. It's a plague; I was looking for some .ai domain last weekend and everything is squatted and for sale for stupid money.

I wish they didn't require a minimum of 2 years for domain registrations.

The reason you wish they didn't require a 2-year prepayment is the same reason they probably want to impose that requirement.

I wish all domain registrations had a minimum of at least ten years.

We should encourage URLs that stay around and discourage speculators and other squatters.

It's great that they're repaying gov debts. If the revenue levels ever decrease, the people will be better off.

Vince Cate sounds decent, ethical and honourable. Other people would be ripping the government off.

Vince has quite the unique and colorful background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Cate

The Map Men did a video on the history of internet country codes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD4hxKkqR4E

I am personally a fan of using the .dev TLD. Any alternatives/ issues with it I should be aware of?

I have a .com and .dev myself. I used to have a .io as well, but I made the decision to avoid ccTLDs.

The only issues I've seen from .dev is:

- It's owned by Google (opinions differ). Google owns a lot more TLDs than I thought...[0].

- Like .app, it requires TLS for web hosting (good for production, annoying for local work).

- Not all services that host DNS support it. For example, Cloudflare's registrar[1] didn't support .dev until August '23.

I don't believe the deprecation of Google Domains has any impact on the Google Registry side of things, but I could be wrong. I transferred my domain out of GD once my preferred registrar supported it.

[0] https://www.registry.google/

TLDs: meme, ing, app, day, new, soy, dev, dad, foo, mov, nexus, how, esq, rsvp, page, phd, prof, zip, boo, and みんな

[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/request-cloudflare-regist...

There is also the .je domain name, I think for Jersey Islands. "je" can be appended to most Dutch words making it "smaller".

For example

Hond (dog) Hondje (small dog)

I own the domain name https://site.je. I wanted to put a cms on it. It's up for sale btw :-)

this site just doesn't do it for me. and for that reason, I'm out

"Je" in slovene also translates to "is" in English. Since adverbs are written before verbs in slovene, it's a nice hack to use http://okusno.je (a recipe website), which translates to "[It] is tasty".

> "je" can be appended to most Dutch words making it "smaller".

Equally true in English, though it's spelled variously -ie or -y.

Dog (hond) doggie (hondje)

I miss .tk :'(

Fun to understand that the reliability of your billion dollar business depends on the decisions of people in Anguilla to hire the right people (like the .to domain)

I want .a .... No I

A windfallf.

Don’t know why you’re being flagged, the way this site editorializes, you’d think they’d correct a typo.

A windfall for a leeward (wind) island

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeward_Islands

typo in headline "windfallf" @dang

fixedf. thanks!

Dang, why was "The Best Headset Yet" removed from the title of this Apple Vision Pro review post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190468

but "Magic, until it's not" is left standing in this post's title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39190506

I'm afraid it was probably just random.

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