I was sorta hoping with the announcement of Google.ai that they would add the .ai extension to Google Domains. Right now there are so few, and very terrible, registers that handle .ai. Like 101domain.com who can only make nameserver changes for you during their 9am to 5pm business hours on weekdays.
.ai is a ccTLD that is run by, I believe, a single person in Anguilla. I do not think it is run on a platform that supports EPP, the standard protocol that is used by registries and registrars to handle automated purchasing of domain names. Given that, it would not be possible to handle .ai domain names on Google Domains. 101domain.com is likely doing a manual process for registering .ai domain names that goes through https://whois.ai/
(Source: I am the eng lead of Google Registry, which run's Google's TLDs.)
> 101domain.com is likely doing a manual process for registering .ai domain names that goes through https://whois.ai/
Gandi seems to do this as well. I recently tried to buy one through them and they quoted $600, and required a corporate subscription. 101domains had the same one for a little over $100, which implied to me that there's a paper process with people somewhere and each registrar is pricing accordingly (since all .ai are $100/2yr flat).
Good timing on your comment, too, since buying-then-transferring seemed like a good strategy until I read it. Didn't realize .ai was so fundamentally manual. Although[0]:
> We expect that about mid 2017 we will support EPP and other registrars.
in the late 90's, I knew the guy that had somehow secured and was running the .so ccTLD single-handedly. In the age of $70/year register.com bills, it seemed insane that a single person could be responsible for an entire TLD. I'm glad to hear that some things on the internet are still run by people.
A large number of ccTLDs are still run by a single random person deep in the bowels of an IT department at some university. I was just at an ICANN meeting in Madrid last week and met some of them.
Also, we (Charleston Road Registry) are definitely not a small company, but we run ~45 TLDs with a team of engineers much smaller than 45, so we have a ratio of TLDs to engineers significantly higher than 1:1.
Well that was really interesting to learn. Thanks! That's pretty amazing it's run by a single person. Many companies are relying / using only a .ai domain which sounds even riskier when you put it that way but maybe I'm just paranoid :)
Fundamentally a registry is just a database that contains the information you see in WHOIS queries along with IP addresses. Writing one with a simple front-end would be an easy weekend hackathon project for an experienced developer. You definitely couldn't implement all of EPP that quickly, but a simple CRUD web application for domain names, sure. There are many dozens of different registry implementations out there, most of them homegrown and running just a single TLD. And let me take a moment to plug our registry software, the source code for which is available here: https://nomulus.foo
It's easy to use, though you need to pay $100 just to get an account and then $100/per domain / per 2 years. The interface is bare bones and you can't do much more then set name server records but it does the job.
Anguilla charges $100 for a two year registration (I'm not sure you can register a domain name for any other period of time). The extra $60 is 101domain's markup.
