A Hurricane Erased Anguilla's Economy. Two Letters Are Rebuilding It.
Anguilla, population 16,000, now gets close to half its government revenue from leasing out the two letters after its own name. It's paying for hospitals, school upkeep, and an airport.
Am I The Idiot — the strongest case against our own take.
The person best positioned to argue against this piece's own optimism is one of the people it quotes. Former Premier Ellis Webster, the same official who directed early .ai money toward senior healthcare in 2024, also said in that same period that Anguilla "can't rely on it solely" and that "you can't predict how long this is going to last." That's not this outlet's caution added after the fact. It's the government's own finance chief, at the moment the windfall was still accelerating, warning that it might not.
There's a specific precedent for that warning, and this piece only mentions it in passing: Tuvalu did almost exactly this with .tv, licensing its own two-letter domain to a private operator and using the proceeds to fund public services, and that windfall diminished over time as the trend that created it cooled. Anguilla's .ai boom is not obviously different in kind. Google's own ad-targeting team classifies .ai as a generic top-level domain rather than a country-specific one, precisely because so many buyers treat it as a brand signal, not an actual link to Anguilla. That means a meaningful share of this revenue is really a bet on how long "AI" stays the hottest two letters in tech branding, not a durable asset tied to anything Anguilla itself did or built.
That's a real tension for this outlet specifically. Elsewhere, this publication has argued the AI industry's own economics look inflated. If that argument is right anywhere, it should worry us here too: Anguilla's new hospitals and school programs are partly funded by the same hype cycle this outlet keeps saying is due for a correction. Cheering the spending without naming that risk would be the half-story this outlet criticizes other coverage for telling.