Countries Are Cashing in on Their Domain Names

Anguilla is raking in extra revenue from registration fees for its .ai web domain thanks to the artificial intelligence boom, but it's not the only place cashing in on demand for websites with distinctive address endings. The AP has details:

• Tuvalu: Tuvalu is a string of coral atolls, scattered over hundreds of miles in the Pacific Ocean, located midway between Australia and Hawaii. It has one of the world's smallest economies and its low-lying islands are vulnerable to climate change, but it does have a very valuable resource: the .tv web domain. Royalties from .tv, which web users might assume is short for television, have been climbing, especially after videogame streaming platform Twitch licensed the web address twitch.tv.

• Libya: The North African country, which has been plagued by turmoil since longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi's death in 2011, isn't readily associated with internet culture. But Libya controls web addresses that end in .ly, which have become widely used as a so-called domain hack for websites with English names that end in -ly. Well-known examples include bit.ly, used by the weblink shortening service Bitly, and parse.ly, the website for online analytics platform Parse.ly.
• Montenegro: This Balkan country became an independent nation after the breakup of Yugoslavia. It's one of Europe's smaller countries—about 620,000 people—bordered by the Adriatic Sea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, and Albania. Montenegro was assigned the .me web domain, which has become popular with people who want to claim their pronoun for personal branding. Websites ending in .me are "often used for personal websites, portfolios, blogs and online resumes or portfolios because 'me' can be seen as a way to personalize an online presence," website builder Wix says.
• Colombia: Websites that end in .co aren't from a generic web domain for companies, like .com sites. The .co domain is assigned to Colombia, but the South American country allows anyone to sign up for its web addresses. Internet registrar GoDaddy says more than 2 million .co web domains have been claimed, including addresses claimed by Big Tech names like Amazon, which uses it to redirect online shoppers to its .com home page. Google, meanwhile, informs visitors to g.co that the link is its official shortcut.

(The tiny Pacific territory of Tokelau became a cybercrime hub because of its .tk domain name.)