Tianyu Fang researched a long and detailed essay called Whose Domain Is It?, detailing the politics of the Internet’s domain names, especially the country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) that you might not realize are actually associated with countries.

The unexpectedly popular ccTLDs can operate like a tourism effort, at least in terms of generating unexpected revenue for small countries:

Domain sales are generating revenue for Anguilla’s government. Per Cate’s estimate, the domain registry is currently generating $3 million in revenue every month for the government, which is somewhere around a third of its monthly budget.

Anguilla isn’t the only microstate with significant government revenue from domain sales, though its relative scale is unmatched. Tuvalu, an island nation in the South Pacific, famously paid for its entry to the United Nations by selling the license for .tv to a US firm at the height of the dot-com bubble; its government made close to $5 million from ccTLD sales in 2022, or 8% of its total revenue that year. Montenegro’s revenue from the .me domain amounted to 2% of total exports in 2015, with the vast majority of the registrant coming from abroad.

These top-level domains are sold, traded, and auctioned as commodities—to be exported by small governments to foreign startups, registrars, and investors in exchange for revenue. But it hasn’t always been that way: in fact, the internet’s early pioneers had intended these digital resources to be community-run infrastructure that served a public function.

Of course, the registrars managing the ccTLDs might not actually have any ties to the government. When ccTLDs were introduced, the registrars weren’t necessary allocated or assigned in an exceptionally precise way. It was essentially first-come first serve:

In 1994, the California native and Berkeley libertarian Vince Cate dropped out from his PhD program at Carnegie Mellon, where he was designing the Alex filesystem. He wanted to relocate to a tax haven but couldn’t afford living in Bermuda or the Cayman Islands. He moved instead to Anguilla, where he paid $470 a month on rent to kickstart an email business. In Anguilla, he was the first to email Postel, who told him that there wasn’t anyone managing Anguilla’s TLD yet and suggested he be the first volunteer manager of .ai.

In this case, the registrar managing the .ai ccTLD is at least a resident, but that’s not always the case:

Many registries, such as .us and .fr, introduced regulations to limit domain registrations to individuals or organizations with actual ties to the country, though they’re enforced to varying degrees. This process of formalization—the transfer of administrative power from volunteers to governments—was complete in most major countries by the early 2000s. In Anguilla, too, Cate changed the administrative contact of .ai to the government of Anguilla, which gladly kept him as the technical manager.

A ccTLD might not be as stable as a generic TLD (gTLD) or as you might think something based on a country might be. Country borders and sovereignty can evolve, especially for territories subject to decades of imperial rule. For example, the .io ccTLD might end if and when British occupation of the Chagos Islands ends:

It’s possible that the British Indian Ocean Territory won’t exist one day—international courts have ruled against British occupation of the Chagos Islands, and the UN General Assembly called for the archipelago’s decolonization in 2019. If these names are struck off the ISO list of countries, we might be left with a world of dead links. The loss of domain names will be trivial compared to the real-world implications of lost lands and lives, yet the cultural heritage that comes with it will, too, be consequential.

The entire essay is fantastic and I recommend reading the entire thing. For more on the current state of the .io ccTLD, see When imperialism ends, so too might the popular .io ccTLD.