The island of Anguilla is rich with natural beauty. If you venture to this tiny oasis in the eastern Caribbean you'll find turquoise waters, palm trees, coral reefs, and some of the most

picturesque white sand beaches in the world.

It's the kind of place you go to when you want to escape modernity

and bathe in the wonders of the physical world.

For many years, and Guilla's economy rested on that beauty.

The island made its money from tourism and lobster fishing.

But in more recent times, Anguilla has struck gold, with a digital asset. Two little letters at the end of

website addresses.

When we first started it was around four or five thousand dollars a month and now we're

this month will be around four million that we're seeing from dot AI. We'll be over half the government budget within a year.

For the Freeconomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Krakkin. Today, top-level domains.

On the internet, websites are identified by an address known as a uniform resource locator or

URL. When we talk about websites we usually refer to URLs by two parts.

There's the second level domain which identifies the

particular website, say Google, and then there's the top level domain which

might be calm. The parts of a URL are separated by dots. So we usually call the top-level domain

dot com.

A top-level domain is a way of sort of categorizing a domain name into a certain subject area if you will.

Kim Davies is the head of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or Ianna for short.

It's the organization responsible for keeping a record of all the domain name identifiers

on the Internet.

All in all, there are nearly 1,500 of them, and each one serves its own purpose.

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