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, Anguilla'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 $4,000 or $5,000 a month, and now this month will be around $4 million that we're seeing from.AI.

We'll be over half the government budget within a year.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things.

I'm Zachary Crockett.

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 com.

The parts of a URL are separated by dots. So we usually call the top level domain dot com. The parts of a URL are separated by dots, so we usually call the top-level domain.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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