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> 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

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)

> 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...

Well, fuck.yu became fuck.me
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_...

Tuvalu is getting larger, not smaller. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1
Soviet Union (.su) it's still around. Even if Tuvalu disappears (it won't) someone else would take care of the TLD.
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.
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

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?
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.

ICANN does not pick the abbreviations. ISO does.
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?
.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)
.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

.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

.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.

Montenegro: .me

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

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....

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

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
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.

"""

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?

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.
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.

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?
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 :-)

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.
typo in headline "windfallf" @dang