https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/
Tiny island country could rake in 10% of its GDP in domain sales this year.
Title quote stolen from JZW: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/10/the-best-way-to-profit-from-ai/
Yet again, the best way to profit from a gold rush is to sell shovels.
Perhaps I am too pessimistic but the first thought I had was about whether or not Anguilla is under threat from rising sea levels, which AI/blockchain shit is e/accelerating, so… ultimately an L if that were the case. My google fu was not strong enough to find out for sure
I remember someone saying the only way to make (real) money in crypto is to run a conference, I imagine AI will be the same for some time
IIRC Tuvalu got something like a $1 billion as a one-time payment for .tv and I figure .io has been fairly lucrative for British Indian Ocean.
I have mixed feelings about small island nations selling their DNS identity out like this but I guess milking tech dweebs for all they're worth is in a certain sense cool and good actually.
I have never understood the .io domain name fad. “ah this site must do something vaguely software development-related, their name is glorksplush dot input output” what
And they fuck with discoverability. For a while I worked with a company, let's call it "Polio". (It was a different *io word.) The URL was, of course ihavepol.io. And then you have to tell people what the URL is, and humans being what they are, every single person will type "ihavepolio.io" or "ihavepolio.com".
Look, folks, do you want customers or do you want to make yourself giggle when you pick a domain name?
I’ve only ever seen one other systems domain and it was something along the lines of awesome.systems and I immediately mentally declared war on it (a personal blog with articles relevant to my interests)
Sadly the Indian Ocean territories is the center of a bitter dispute, and I doubt any of the revenue from IO domains accrues to those displaced from their homes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagos_Archipelago_sovereignty_dispute
Shoulda guessed from the name "British Indian Ocean" it's a region mired in the most heinous imperialist bullshit.
I wish the colonists a very nice time and I hope very comical things happen to them from the point of view of the Chagossians.
It's a bit more involved than that.
The part where BIOT is located is geographically close to Mauritius, which used to be part of the Empire. When decolonization happened, part of the principle was that the entire constituent part was to be decolonized. But at the time, the Vietnam war was happening, the US wanted the UK to contribute, the UK did not want to send armed forces, so the compromised by offering Diego Garcia as an airbase. But to do that, they needed to keep control over it, so they simply ignored the principle of keeping the decolonized territory intact, kept the Chagos, kicked out everyone who lived there, and there we are.
@gerikson @bitofhope weirdly enough I did a bit of digging into the history of .io and it's most likely that neither the BIOT (which barely exists as an entity other than on paper anyway) or HMG has ever been paid anything in relation to it. https://blat.at/@m/111340851187004203
On that note, saw this earlier this week: https://social.bitfolk.com/@grifferz/111330591956631667