How Two Little Letters Made Anguilla into a Hidden Caribbean Goldmine
Photo Credit: Skift
Skift Take
Anguilla is a small island with a big secret. It owns one of the most lucrative pieces of digital real estate in the world: the .ai domain. Now that ChatGPT brought artificial intelligence mainstream, it holds the potential to transform the island's tourism economy – and its future.
The year was 1985. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev led the world’s superpowers. Madonna and Duran Duran topped the pop charts. The smell of neon and capitalism was in the air.
While yuppies and suburbanites waged backyard cola wars, a small group of computer scientists worked diligently, creating the infrastructure for the first wave of a technological revolution that would soon change the world: the internet.
In university labs and corporate research centers, they laid the groundwork for the digital era. They created the syntax for the first URLs – the familiar .com for companies and .edu for schools.
The same was true for nations. At the University of Southern California, the first top-level country domains were assigned. Some will sound very familiar – .us for the United States, .uk for the United Kingdom. For the next 10 years, they digitally indexed the world.
By 1995, they reached the small Caribbean island of Anguilla. It was
