Small countries with large domain endings: .ai is the latest example that they can cause problems.

February 20th, ship’s anchor damaged the submarine cable connecting Anguilla to the Interneta small archipelago of only 14,000 people in the Caribbean, dependent on the United Kingdom.

Problem? A small area of ​​Anguilla is responsible for terminating the .ai domain, which has grown in recent months due to the growing number of projects related to artificial intelligence. Due to this binding, domain registrars around the world were unable to connect and perform any action on the .ai domain, such as registering or renewing, for several hours.

“It was a minor issue because it was fixed within a few hours. They set up a radio link that served as a backup for communication, and it seems that it will remain in case of a recurrence, ”he explains. Marc Gelabert, CEO INWX Spainone of the registrars who tweeted about the incident and had to deal with this lack of communication.

The outage meant that all activity was suspended at this time, both new domain contracts and DNS changes. Everything, as statistics show, has doubled since the launch of ChatGPT in the fall of 2022.reaching over 150,000 entries.

But besides this andHe scare .ai is the latest example of how many hot domains belong to small countries and territories.who sometimes capitalize on the sudden growth of its completion, as if it were a lottery, and sometimes it turns into a form of robbery.

In addition, all the intricacies of buying and selling domains and the instability that can be on the Internet at any given time.

“In addition, for registrar companies and companies that are trusted to terminate their website from one of these countries, this also sometimes entails additional risk,” explains Gelabert, who at INWX deals with domain termination in almost all territories , with the exception of, for example, an exception. , North Korea.

Here is a short journey through the scattered islands and countries through the endings of their domains:

From Anguilla Business (.ai) to Chagos Problem (.io)

To tell a story well, it is also necessary to go back to the days when the Internet was just beginning to lay its foundations.

professor at the University of Southern California Jon Postel is one of the creators of the existing Internet domain infrastructure. Starting with generics (.com, .net…) decided that it would be nice if every country in the world or territory had its own extension. In 1985, he had already assigned the first three: .us (for the US), .uk (for the United Kingdom), and .il (for Israel). Ten years later, he was in almost every country in the world.

To manage these country-specific extensions, an administrator was needed: someone who would sell domain names, provide technical support, and receive a cut of the profits as compensation. Postel did not think of transferring administrative authority over them to the governments of each territory.but began to give them to the first who asked for it.

Postel ran .us for years, dividing what he had in the main countries mostly among university colleagues. Of course, at that time there would have been no one who was interested or knew about it. This was the building spirit of the Internet.

But this, logically, has changed.

In 1994, with over a hundred ccTLDs already in existence, Postel updated its policy. Country-specific domain name administrators now had to have at least some connection to the respective countries, had to reach an agreement with the competent authorities (although no governments were specified), and also had to have at least one person involved in the person who manages completion of the domain, lives in the corresponding country.

In many cases, the system did not work because many Western entrepreneurs managed domain endings from developing countries. .ly Libya – now used, for example, bit.ly – went to a British businessman who pretended to live in Tripoli.

Over time, other cases appeared, somewhat more beneficial for the territories to which these endings belong: .tv, known for its network endings and now thriving on Twitch, has also been handed over to the government of Tuvalu. external company Verisign, the largest in the industry and managing .com or .net domains, which pays him an average of $5 million a year.

Tuvalu’s most notable customer is Amazon, which has bought an online video game streaming site. Twitch.tv for $970 million in 2014.

In accordance with Washington Posta contract with Verisign is enough for Tuvalu to earn a twelfth of its GDP just by licensing its “.tv” domain.

Anguilla and its .ai is another case where the island’s local government continues to hold on to power. In 2018, the sale of .ai domains left $2.8 million in the coffers of the small archipelago.an amount that, given the increase in registrations, today could easily be multiplied by 5.

“In the case of .ai, it is true that it is run by a company linked to the island government. There are other cases where, although this is also the case, it works much worse, or the person who runs it is a third company that has nothing to do with the territory, ”explains Gelabert.

This is the case in the example .io domainsused to relate them to programming (used as an abbreviation for input Output) and belongs British Indian Ocean Territorya remote collection of small islands and atolls scattered between Africa and India in the middle of the Indian Ocean, also known as the Chagos.

There, the external administration of its domains is linked to a history of exploitation of its indigenous people due to the strategic position of the island, which has always been the object of a desire to host military bases, forcing many of its inhabitants for decades. . . . Obviously, this is the flip side of how the internet connects the dots in a completely random way, for better or worse.

And from the success of .tk to the .so used for software… and pirates from Somalia

We continue our journey through Tokelaua New Zealand-owned archipelago of less than 2,000 people… and 25.1 million domains registered on its territory. address .tk.

To what do you owe your success? Your local government, which handles termination, has decided that your domains will be free and expired ones will never be deleted.

“Each manager or rights holder can make the decisions he considers regarding price, rates or forms of payment. Going back to .ai, for example, they have a minimum registration period of two years,” says Gelabert.

This very diverse idiosyncrasy has to do with how domain management rights are granted to ICANN in a competitive process that is usually not without controversy. Since 2014, many new endings have been introduced to reduce the weight of the .com domain. and provide other options, since it was very difficult to find free domains. This is where the .top, .pro, .wyz, .online, .shop or .online domains originated and became commonplace, with another extension expected to come soon.

However, with respect to terminations associated with a territory, the theory says that it must be an entity associated with a country. This, as we have seen, sometimes happens and sometimes not. And this also brings its own problems.

“There are some particularly difficult cases, such as the .so cases in Somalia. In such an unstable country, you can not hear anything about them for days. There are other registrars who still work with faxes…” Gelabert continues to comment on the underworld of domain endings. In the same week, they had a new panic, when with the death of the sole owner and manager of the largest registrar .to (Tonga) many domains remained in the air. “Basically, we’re trying to provide free support to people whose domains are in limbo,” he explains.

The .so is actually especially relevant because it is used by many companies and software development communities, as well as companies such as the well-known Notion tool.

Though it’s colder than a Caribbean island We are finalizing the process of terminating the Channel Island of Guernsey domain (.gg), also dependent on the British crown. Its usage has grown due to its popularity among Twitch users, as “gg” is a popular phrase in online gaming, a common shorthand for “good game”.

A whole collection of oddities hinting that the Internet’s substratum is sometimes built on much more random foundations than it seems.