If you rent an .ai domain, a portion of the fee goes to the tiny island, Anguilla, that it nominally represents. The AI boom has been good business for the British Overseas Territory, with only 15,000 residents.
"It's about US $3 million per month," said Vince Cate, who runs the registry on the government's behalf. "… 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."
Cate, unlike some of the people who run this sort of thing for small countries, seems to be a good guy:
Tuvalu gave [domain registrations] to a big foreign company, and locked themselves in for 50 years. And we're doing it locally. So the government is getting almost all the money. And that's not what was happening in Tuvalu, right? Most of the money was not going to the country.
Another far-fling British possession's domain, .io. is similarly popular, but more controversial as the revenues do not appreciate to locals: they were forced out to make way for airbases.
See also Bouvet Island (Norwegian, uninhabited, .bv) and, of course, the Soviet Union (dissolved, .su)
