ccTLD

About 9 years ago, I sold a very nice .com domain name to a startup that used a ccTLD domain name. The CEO was not a shrewd negotiator, and in the course of our discussion about why he *needed* to buy my .com domain name, he told me about some of the issues he was having with his current domain name. The primary issue? Email.

Employees were having issues when they filled out forms and signed up for various accounts. Corporate emails from employees were also inadvertently being marked as spam by recipient email providers. This was in addition to confusion for consumers, but at that time, it seemed like the email issues plaguing the company were on the top of the CEO’s mind.

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.