dot com et al.The secret life of Internet domains

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OpenAI made headlines in 2023 when it bought chat.com for $15m to host ChatGPT, but big ticket domain purchases are nothing new: wine.com sold for $3m in the late 90s, and hotels.com went for $11m in 2001.

Anguilla, the small island nation, earns over 20% of its revenue on sales of .ai domain names. When Yugoslavia split in the early 90s, a group of Slovenian academics conducted a literal heist of Serbia's IT building to steal domain records for the .yu top-level domain (TLD).

Ten years ago, Paul Graham argued in his essay Change Your Name that all serious companies must own a .com domain. Does that still hold true today? There are now hundreds of TLDs, like .band, .city, .how, .pizza, and even .wtf. Who creates these? And how do they decide how much you pay?

dot com et al. explores the history, economics, and artistry of domains. Sign up to read emails (it'll help you decide whether to read the book).