10% of Anguilla's GDP is .ai domain fees (2023) | Hacker News Reader

10% of Anguilla's GDP is .ai domain fees (2023)

arstechnica.com

43 pointshwayne18 comments

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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!

Some nations have fossil oil deposits, some nations have cool TLDs

16k population. Wow! Must be a chill place.

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..

Anguilla only has 15K people and GDP of $307 million.

They are tax haven but a small one, and it may not contribute much to GDP.

Totally random thing I just noticed looking around the Caribbean with Google Maps:

1. Apparently regular people can upload street views to Google? https://www.google.com/streetview/contribute/

2. The Puerto Rico tourism board did this and branded their street view panoramas: https://www.google.com/maps/@18.3101092,-65.2949864,3a,75y,5...

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39194477

And related flipside:

Not all TLDs are Created Equal

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39367540

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.

I think it’s often because the namespace of cute TLDs is less crowded.

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

.io used to be trendy but no more, and now some people feel stuck on expensive domains.

I let my .io domains expire and moved some things when .io cranked up the registration fees.

So like dot com?

Still the most professional one?

This sort of news reminds me of that scene in The Big Short.

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