.ai, .io and .tv and their surprising stories

Are .ai, .io and .tv generic TLDs, like .com or .net?

No, and that’s what makes them so interesting. They are ccTLDs (country-code Top-Level Domains). In other words, they correspond to country codes and are delegated to their respective states. But their initial use has been diverted for commercial purposes because of their similarity to buzz words. With varying degrees of success!

Which geographic TLDs were the first to be converted to generic use?

.TV: Tuvalu or television was one of the first ccTLDs to have been diverted from its geographic vocation. Because of its similarity to the abbreviation of “television”, .TV was appropriated by audiovisual and streaming actors, like France Télévisions for example, which uses it for its official website france.tv. Having reached over 500,000 names at its peak, the TLD is now in decline for the simple reason that “TV” has less resonance in the age of major digital platforms.

.NU: Niue island or a Swedish sensation. .NU has been assigned to the small island of Niue, in the South Pacific, since 1997. Yet the TLD met with surprising success in Sweden! “Nu” in Swedish means “now”, making the domain popular for its potential to evoke spontaneity, modernity, and a certain cool attitude. Now managed by the Swedish registry IIS.SE, the .NU TLD reached the 500,000 name mark at its pinnacle in 2017, rivalling Sweden’s own ccTLD .SE. Since in decline, it continues nonetheless to follow the same trend as .SE, reflecting changing uses rather than a disengagement.

Who are the current rockstars?

With the emergence of AI, the .AI TLD is naturally in vogue, standing for Anguilla or Artificial Intelligence. Available since 1995, .AI is the ccTLD of Anguilla, a small British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean with a population of less than 20,000. The domain had long remained exclusive, that was until artificial intelligence thrust it into the limelight: there were 11,000 names registered in 2016, compared with just 5,000 in 2015. A number that has since skyrocketed to over 850,000 currently!

Another big hit has been .IO, for the British Indian Ocean Territory or Input/Output. Although it is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory, an almost uninhabited archipelago, .IO has become a favourite with tech start-ups since 2010 for its resemblance to the computing term “input/output” (I/O or informally IO). 67,000 names were registered in 2014, and over 1.1 million in mid-2025! There is a fair amount of uncertainty at the moment surrounding its future, given that the territory was recently transferred to Mauritius which already has its own ccTLD .MU. That said, it seems unlikely that the Mauritian government will forgo such a considerable source of revenue.

What about the flops?

I can think of two in particular:

.MD for Moldavia has never been widely taken up by the medical sector. Despite the efforts of some actors in the health sector to reposition Moldavia’s ccTLD as a medical domain (“MD” in reference to “Medical Doctor”), uptake has been limited, with barely 30,000 names registered in 2023 demonstrating the TLD’s failure to win over the healthcare world.

.SR, for Surinam, has not had great success with the senior market either. Delegated to Surinam as its ccTLD in 1991, it was briefly marketed by a third-party distributor as the go-to domain for companies targeting the senior market. But this appropriation was short-lived: with just 4,500 names registered, .SR has never caught on in the “silver economy”.

Any other surprising examples?

There is one interesting example that comes to mind in the field of Internet governance. The country code top-level domain of a country that no longer exists!

.SU (for “Soviet Union”). It was delegated to the Soviet Union on 19 September 1990 and has never been used for any other purpose, which is precisely what makes it such a dinosaur in the world of the Web. When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the .SU ccTLD remained active simply because there was no official framework to deal with such a situation.

You have to remember that the technical governance of the Internet was only officialised in 1994 with the publication of a founding document (RFC 1591), and then with the creation of ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organisation tasked with coordinating domain name management on a global scale) in 1998.

When ICANN suggested the removal of .SU, as had been the case with other domains linked to disappearing countries (.YU for Yugoslavia, .ZR for Zaire), it met with fierce opposition from the Russian users who had been using it for the past fifteen or so years. The ccTLD was ultimately left in place and continues to exist to this day, hovering at around 100,000 names registered.

What about .FR?

It is unlikely that France’s ccTLD will have its original usage twisted at some point because the domain is so inextricably linked to the country. But in an ecosystem where imagination often transcends borders, it is not altogether impossible that it too becomes caught up in an unexpected trend someday. In this regard, it is users that in fact ratify (or not) marketing innovations through their everyday behaviour!