Anguilla is self-governing British territory, and most of the country’s population of some 16,000 people are African-Caribbean. It covers a total area of 91 square kilometers. Forbes, a U.S. economic media outlet, recently reported that Anguilla, a small island nation in the Central American Caribbean Sea, are sitting on a cash cow because of their national Internet addresses they secured in the 1980s.
The national domain of anguilla is ‘.ai’, which has become popular among IT companies around the world thanks to the recent artificial intelligence craze and the demand for the domain has soared. The national domain is an alphabetic character attached to the back of an Internet site, and is mostly abbreviated with a country name. The national domain assigned to Korea is ‘.kr’. Some countries entrust their domains to the private sector and sell them to foreign companies.
The ‘ai’ domain is gaining popularity because it seems intuitively related to artificial intelligence. Since November 30, 2022, when the initial beta of ChatGPT, a generative AI, was released, sales in the ai domain have roughly quadrupled.
Vince Kate, who manages the domain sales of Anguilla, recently said in an IEEE Spectrum interview with the American Society of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) that the domain revenue is around $3 million a month. He predicted that profits would double to $6 million a month in a year due to a surge in demand for the “ai” domain.
The main industries of Anguilla are tourism, banking, and fishing, and some taxes, including property taxes, have been reduced due to the recent huge domain sales. Global IT companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta, which entered the AI business earlier, have secured the “ai” domain. In Korea, Naver Clova and Kakao have joined the ranks of using the “ai” domain.
Anguilla have used the “ai” domain since the late 1980s. The International Internet Address Management Organization (ICANN) has assigned two-letter domains to each country. Anguilla, which received “ai” abbreviated to their country names at the time, did not expect to make a profit, but as time went by, domains brought good luck.
EJ SONG
US ASIA JOURNAL
