Simba the "Tech King"
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her, frantically typing on a laptop and muttering, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late for the .ai domain auction! The Queen of Hearts wants HeartAttack.ai and it’s already at $50,000!”
And so begins our tumble down the most peculiar rabbit hole of the modern internet: the wonderland of web domain name speculation, where grown adults mortgage their houses for eight-letter combinations, where artificial intelligence has sparked a gold rush for two-letter suffixes, and where the very concept of web addresses teeters on the edge of obsolescence while simultaneously reaching peak absurdity.
Welcome to a world where logic has taken a permanent vacation and the Mad Hatter’s tea party looks like a sensible investment strategy.
The .COM Queen’s Croquet Game
“Take more .com,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
“I’ve had nothing yet,” Alice replied, “so I can’t take more.”
“You mean you can’t take less,” said the Hatter. “It’s very easy to take more than nothing.”
“But what if I have to go into debt?” asked Alice.
“Then you’ll have more debt than nothing, which is something!” exclaimed the Mad Hatter, spinning his hat. “And something is always better than nothing in the domain business!”
This exchange, overheard at a recent domain investors’ conference in Las Vegas, perfectly encapsulates the Through-the-Looking-Glass logic of contemporary domain speculation. Industry experts now routinely advise entrepreneurs to “buy a .com domain, go into debt if you have to”—a financial philosophy that would make even the Queen of Hearts pause before shouting “Off with their heads!”
The reasoning, if we can call it that, follows a peculiar sort of digital manifest destiny: .com domains are the prime real estate of the internet, therefore any .com is valuable, therefore debt is merely the down payment on inevitable riches. It’s a logic so circular that even the Cheshire Cat would struggle to follow its grin.
Domain broker Magnus Christensen explains the psychology: “You have to understand, .com domains are like beachfront property on the internet. Would you hesitate to mortgage your house for a plot of land in Manhattan? Of course not! The same principle applies to PurpleCatWhistle.com or FridgeRepairZimbabwe.com. These are digital assets with infinite appreciation potential.”
The fact that most websites now receive the majority of their traffic from social media platforms, search engines, and direct navigation rather than typed domain names is, according to Christensen, “irrelevant to the fundamental value proposition of owning premium digital real estate.”
The .AI Mad Tea Party
But wait—there’s a new guest at the Mad Hatter’s table, and it’s causing quite the commotion. The .ai suffix, originally intended for the small Caribbean island of Anguilla, has become the most coveted two-letter combination since “OK” entered the lexicon.
“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter asked Alice.
“What riddle?” Alice inquired.
“Why is a .ai domain like a raven?”
Alice pondered this. “I give up. Why?”
“Because both are expensive and neither does what you expect them to do!” the Hatter cackled, slapping his knee.
The artificial intelligence boom has transformed the humble .ai extension into the internet’s equivalent of cryptocurrency speculation meets digital fashion accessory. Companies are paying astronomical sums for .ai domains with the same fervor that Dutch merchants once paid for tulip bulbs, and with roughly the same amount of rational economic justification.
ChatGenie.ai sold for $850,000. SmartBot.ai commanded $1.2 million. Even RandomThought.ai fetched $300,000, presumably because someone, somewhere, believed that artificial intelligence is best represented by random thoughts—a hypothesis that anyone who has used an AI chatbot can probably confirm.
The paradox is delicious in its absurdity: companies are paying premium prices for domain names to host AI services that increasingly make domain names irrelevant. It’s like buying an expensive sign to advertise a business that exists only in customers’ imaginations.
The Cheshire Cat’s Disappearing Website Dilemma
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” asked Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here. Besides, why do you need a domain name when I can answer any question you have right now?”
And here lies the most deliciously absurd paradox of our digital wonderland: just as domain speculation reaches its most frenzied peak, the very concept of websites is beginning to evaporate like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
Why visit WeatherForecast.com when you can ask an AI chatbot for the weather? Why navigate to CookingTips.ai when ChatGPT can provide personalized recipes instantly? Why remember RecipeCollection.com when AI can generate custom meal plans based on your dietary restrictions, ingredient preferences, and the contents of your refrigerator?
The traditional web is becoming what the Cheshire Cat called “mostly gone”—still there if you look carefully, but increasingly irrelevant to how people actually access information. Yet domain speculators continue their mad tea party, trading digital real estate for services that bypass the very concept of addresses.
The Queen of Hearts’ Payment Processing Problem
“What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to them?”
“No use to them,” said Alice, “but it’s useful to the people who name them, I suppose.”
This conversation between Alice and the Gnat perfectly captures the modern domain economy. Domain names have become useful primarily to the people selling them, rather than the people who might theoretically use them.
The entire domain aftermarket has evolved into an elaborate shell game where speculators buy domains hoping to sell them to other speculators who hope to sell them to entrepreneurs who hope customers will remember to type their URLs correctly. It’s a pyramid scheme disguised as real estate investment, built on the assumption that human memory is more reliable than it actually is.
Consider the psychology of domain pricing: SuperCheapFlights.com might cost $15,000 because it contains keywords that were valuable in 2003, when people searched by typing descriptive phrases into address bars. Meanwhile, OpenAI receives millions of users daily who access their service through direct navigation, apps, and AI-powered search results that never display their domain name prominently.
The disconnect is so profound it would make even the Mad Hatter question his sanity.
Through the Looking Glass of Search
“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.
Alice replied rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed a few times since then.”
“What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”
“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see. I used to be someone who typed domain names into browsers, but now I just ask ChatGPT for everything.”
The transformation Alice describes reflects the broader evolution of internet behavior. Users who once navigated the web by remembering and typing domain names now access information through conversational interfaces that treat the entire internet as a searchable database rather than a collection of discrete websites.
This shift has profound implications for the domain speculation economy. If users increasingly access information through AI interfaces that synthesize results from multiple sources, what value does owning a specific domain provide? It’s like owning a specific address in a city where everyone travels by teleportation.
The Mock Turtle’s Lessons in Digital Economics
“What did you learn from your domain investment course?” asked Alice.
“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flippers, “Mystery, ancient and modern, with Speculation—then Bubbleonomics, and then Debt, and Debt includes Ambition, Delusion, Distraction, and Fainting in Coils.”
The Mock Turtle’s curriculum perfectly summarizes the educational experience of domain speculation. Students learn to treat uncertainty as opportunity, confuse speculation with investment, and master the art of convincing themselves that digital addresses have intrinsic value independent of their utility.
The most advanced course, “Fainting in Coils,” teaches investors how to maintain consciousness while watching their premium domain portfolios generate zero revenue quarter after quarter, while simultaneously arguing that AI-powered search represents a temporary disruption rather than a fundamental shift in how humans access information.
The Trial of the Domain Thief
“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said.
“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence before the verdict!”
“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.
“I won’t!” said Alice. “You can’t sentence someone for stealing a domain name that has no actual value!”
And therein lies the crux of our digital dilemma: the entire domain economy operates on Queen of Hearts logic, where conclusions precede evidence, where value is declared rather than demonstrated, and where questioning the fundamental premise is treated as heresy rather than rational inquiry.
The domain speculation market has created its own reality where eight-letter combinations command prices comparable to luxury automobiles, where the extension .ai magically transforms any word into a valuable asset, and where the advice to “go into debt” for digital addresses is considered sound business strategy rather than financial suicide.
The Caucus-Race of Obsolescence
“Everybody has won, and all must have prizes!” declared the Dodo at the end of the Caucus-race, where everyone ran in circles and nobody reached a finish line.
This perfectly describes the current state of domain speculation in the age of AI. Everyone claims victory—domain sellers profit from inflated prices, speculators profit from flipping domains to other speculators, and AI companies profit from creating demand for .ai extensions. Meanwhile, the actual utility of domain names quietly evaporates as users increasingly bypass websites altogether.
The race continues, with participants running frantically in all directions while the destination they’re trying to reach slowly disappears. It’s a spectacle so absurd that even Lewis Carroll might have considered it too surreal for publication.
As we tumble deeper down this rabbit hole, one thing becomes clear: in a world where artificial intelligence can answer any question instantly, the Mad Hatter’s tea party of domain speculation looks increasingly like a gathering of characters who have forgotten what they were originally celebrating, but continue the party anyway because stopping would force them to acknowledge that the celebration no longer makes sense.
Have you fallen down the domain speculation rabbit hole, or do you think the whole market is madder than the Mad Hatter’s tea party? Are .ai domains the new tulip bulbs, or are we witnessing genuine digital transformation? In an age where AI can answer questions instantly, is buying premium domains like investing in premium phone numbers in the era of smartphones? And most importantly—if everyone is accessing information through AI chatbots, why are we still playing this elaborate game of digital real estate?
Share your thoughts on whether domain names are becoming as obsolete as the Dodo, or if there’s still method to this digital madness.
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