The sites in ".ai", more and more appreciated by the artificial intelligence sector, bring a lot of money to... the island of Anguilla, of which it is the official domain name on the Internet, told the AFP one of the managers of this extension. 

Indeed, the two letters ".ai" do not refer to the initials "artificial intelligence" in English, but to this British territory of the Caribbean, which like any country or territory has a national extension that it manages as it pleases. But the booming AI sector has taken hold of this name which evokes its sector, and more and more companies are buying ".ai" sites.

For Anguilla, which charges $60 a year for them and has raised its prices, monthly revenue has doubled in the past six months, said Vince Cate, the island's domain name technical manager. Anguilla does not ask buyers for any proof of connection to its territory.

The ".ai" represents the third largest source of revenue for the island's government. "At the current rate of growth, I think it will represent its second source by the end of 2023 and eventually its first," Cate estimated, without specifying the amount.

Mathematically, at $60 a year, that means revenue on the order of $10 million a year. "There are two kinds of extensions, those in two letters that correspond to a country or a territory and the generic names that represent a sector", explains Pierre Bonis, general manager of the company. Pierre Bonis, director general of Afnic, which manages the domain ".fr", explains. "It is a detour of the use of a national domain name," he said, citing other similar cases in recent years.

Thus the ".tv" used by the world television channels is in reality the domain name of Tuvalu, a Polynesian archipelago. The ".io" has been adopted by developers who see in it the initials input/output, a common abbreviation in computer science, whereas it is the domain Indian Ocean, belonging to a British island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. "This is a practice that exists for small countries. But the price of '.ai' is high - in comparison, Afnic charges 4.56 euros for '.fr' - and is not intended to become massive," according to Bonis.

Source : La Libre