Tiny Caribbean island of Anguilla turns AI boom into a digital gold mine
(15 Oct 2024)
RESTRICTIONS SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
London, Anguilla – 15 October 2024 (via video call)
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Ellis Webster, Premier of Anguilla:
“I think we are lucky. And that’s how I look at it. But I think it’s time enough. So back in 1995, when countries were given.. these designations, Anguilla’s dot which was .ai, I guess they could have given Antigua, you know, it because they were also there starting with a. But Anguilla, ai, was given.
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2. SOUNDBITE (English) Ellis Webster, Premier of Anguilla:
“But you can’t predict how long this is going to last. And so I don’t want to have our economy and our country and all our programmes just based on this and then all of a sudden there’s a new fad comes up in the next year or two and then we are left now having to make significant expenditure cuts, removing programmes, taking away scholarships, because now we can’t fund it or having to raise the rate of the tax, which then again is a burden to our people. So I’m using that caution that this is a windfall, but we can’t rely on it solely. We have to make sure that our programmes are set up so that they can still be sustainable if things, God forbid, change in the next year or two. So I don’t want us to have our whole budget based on this money, and that’s why we need the programmes that we know and the revenue streams that we know are more consistent and dependable.”
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3. SOUNDBITE (English) Ellis Webster, Premier of Anguilla:
“And we don’t have any specific artificial intelligence companies yet. But that is one of our goals, is to make this a hub.”
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4. SOUNDBITE (English) Ellis Webster, Premier of Anguilla:
“We also are looking at some other social programmes, you know, in terms of health care, terms of education. We can say now before we would get some help from the European Development Fund, but with Brexit that went away. The UK has not replaced that, you know, and so we can say these programmes that we want to get done, we can do them. We know climate change is an existential threat to us. We need to get financing for mitigation adaptation.”
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STORYLINE:
The artificial intelligence boom has benefited chatbot makers, computer scientists and Nvidia investors.
It’s also providing an unusual windfall for Anguilla, a tiny island in the Caribbean.
ChatGPT’s debut nearly two years ago heralded the dawn of the AI age and kicked off a digital gold rush as companies scrambled to stake their own claims by acquiring websites that end in .ai.
That’s where Anguilla comes in.
The British territory was allotted control of the .ai internet address in the 1990s.
It was one of hundreds of obscure top-level domains assigned to individual countries and territories based on their names.
While the domains are supposed to indicate a website has a link to a particular region or language, it’s not always a requirement.
Anguilla’s earnings from web domain registration fees quadrupled last year to $32 million, fuelled by the surging interest in AI.
The income now accounts for about 20% of Anguilla’s total government revenue. Before the AI boom, it hovered at around 5%.
Anguilla’s government, which uses the gov.ai home page, collects a fee every time a .ai web address is renewed, Identity Digital Chief Strategy Officer Ram Mohan said the fee — $140 for two years — won’t change.
It also gets paid when new addresses are registered and expired ones are sold off. Some sites have fetched tens of thousands of dollars.
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