ccTLD

There is no question that .AI domain names have become a hot topic of late. With considerable amounts of venture funding flowing into AI companies and established companies who embrace .AI, the number of .AI domain names being scooped up has grown. Tremendously. The NYTimes, among other mainstream publications, wrote about the windfall .AI domain name registrations and renewals is providing to the country of Anguilla since .AI is the ccTLD for Anguilla.

I recently published Andrew Miller’s thoughts on .AI domain names, and I wanted to share some of my own thoughts about them.

Country Code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) are internet domain name extensions that are designated for a country or sovereign state. Each is identified by two-letter codes such as .IT for Italy, .CA for Canada, and .IN for India. The primary purpose of a ccTLD is to show its association with a particular geographical locations.

In addition to its local usage, ccTLD domain names have long been used as .com alternatives or for domain name hacks. For instance, years ago, the .LY extension was popular because of services like Bitly. More recently .AI and .IO have become popular domain name extensions that are sought after by companies and domain investors alike from around the world.

Pickleball player Ammar Kubba – founder of and investor in numerous domain industry companies – recently announced two .io domain name sales. The first sale was closed while he was playing pickleball. The second was closed while he was thinking about playing pickleball.

Notably, after sharing his second .io domain name sale, Ammar shared some background about other domain names with the same keyword. I found this noteworthy because the attributes of the other extensions were not what I would normally guess for a ~$10k .io domain name sale.