Author | Tang Yitao
Editor | Jing Yu
In 1848, a carpenter stumbled upon gold leaf in a river in the Koroma area of California. Although he tried to keep this secret, gold doesn't lie, and a gold rush swept across the United States. Many people flocked to California with the dream of getting rich overnight. Between 1847 and 1870, San Francisco's population soared from 500 to 150,000, and the city was nicknamed "Golden Mountain."
Diggers who work in harsh conditions in the wild often complain that their pants are not strong enough. Jewish businessman Levi Strauss saw this business opportunity and invented the first pair of jeans - a pair of trousers made of strong tarpaulin. The rivet design increased the durability of the trousers and the pockets An extra small pocket inside can store valuables such as gold. The brand Levi's was born from this.
In order to prove the tenacity of jeans, Straw designed a performance in which two horses pulled the jeans, and the two-horse leather label became Levi's logo | Image source: levistrauss
Most people don't dig gold, and even if they do, few people can seize the wealth that comes overnight. There are many places to spend money in emerging cities - bars, brothels, casinos... Strauss did not participate in this competition. He did a business that was sure to make money without losing money: serving competitors. The Los Angeles Times estimated that by the time of his death, Strauss' assets had reached US$6 million, which is approximately US$20 million (approximately 146 million yuan) today. As the famous proverb goes, "During the gold rush, the most profitable thing was selling shovels."
In today's AI gold rush, the small island of Anguilla in the Atlantic Ocean has become a "shovel seller" by accident.
Anguilla | Picture source: Tripadvisor
Like all tropical islands, Anguilla's specialty is sun and beaches. The land here is dry, crops are difficult to survive, and there are almost no natural resources. Tourism is the pillar industry here.
Since the 1990s, the development of the Internet has allowed this small island country to add a virtual asset out of thin air - "ai" can be the abbreviation of Artificial Intelligence, or it can be the domain name of Anguilla.
AI technology has a long history of development. It can be traced back to the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, when computer scientist John McCarthy proposed the concept of "artificial intelligence". In the following decades, AI technology has been growing slowly and steadily, just like domain names with the suffix ".ai". Anguilla could receive some money, but not much.
The situation changed on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. Since then, all technology companies have been doing the same thing - grabbing data, talent, graphics cards, and domain names.
Representatives of these are Stable Diffusion’s parent company Stability.ai, Musk’s X.ai and Character.ai. Technology giants have also set up their own AI pages, such as facebook.ai and microsoft.ai.
After the release of ChatGPT, .ai registered domain names began to grow exponentially｜Image source: axios
Vince Cate, who has managed domain names in Anguilla since the 1990s, told Bloomberg that the number of .ai domain name registrations has almost doubled in the past year to more than 280,000.
Like many commodities, the price of domain names is variable. Every time a user registers a .ai domain name through a registrar like GoDaddy or NameCheap, the registrar needs to pay a fee to Anguilla. Before April 2023, the price was still US$120 every two years, but it has now risen to US$140.
Kate estimates that Anguilla's revenue from domain name registrations in 2023 will reach between US$25 million and US$30 million. Just two years ago, that number was only $8.3 million. Although this is incomparable with the billions of dollars in funding that the AI industry can generate at every turn, you must know that Anguilla is just a small island with an area of 91 square kilometers and a population of less than 20,000; during the epidemic, its pillar industry, tourism, was also affected. Influence.
Anguilla's revenue from domain name registration over the years, the blue part is the estimated value | Image source: Bloomberg
According to the 2023 fiscal forecast released by Anguilla, its full-year recurring revenue is estimated at US$107 million. In other words, even the low end of Kate's forecast range, $25 million, would account for a quarter of Anguilla's annual revenue.
Another island nation benefiting from this Internet boom is Tuvalu, located in the Pacific Ocean. Tuvalu and Anguilla are even smaller, with only 26 square kilometers, ranking fourth from the bottom among sovereign countries in the world.
Tuvalu's good fortune is that its top-level domain name happens to be the same as TV, the English abbreviation for television. It was with the first $1 million from leasing domain names that Tuvalu was able to pay the cost of joining the United Nations in 2000. The Tuvalu government now earns about $10 million a year from GoDaddy. According to Tuvalu’s 2019 fiscal report, this revenue accounted for 8.4% of the Tuvalu government’s annual revenue.
To some extent, domain name registration is like a real estate business on the Internet. Some far-sighted people were optimistic about a certain domain name, registered it first, and continued to pay management fees, quietly waiting for the wave of the times to hit here one day. The typical resale price ranges from a few dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, but some rare domain names can fetch quite a lot.
In 2017, Musk spent at least $5 million to buy back the x.com domain name from Paypal. The same Musk bought Tesla’s domain name tesla.com for US$11 million.
Elon Musk tweeted to celebrate getting back the X.com domain name | Image source: Twitter
At present, the popularity of artificial intelligence has declined, and some doubts have emerged. But one thing is certain, humans are still in the early stages of artificial intelligence, which also means that humans are still in the early stages of .ai domain name registration.
For Anguilla, this may be a business that can last hundreds of years.
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