Quick chat with the man running .ai Vincent Cate

Back in November I interviewed one of the first .ai domain name investors, Igor Gabrielan. Today I did a quick chat with Vincent Cate the man who is running the .ai registry. I asked him about pricing, his start with .ai and a few other questions. If you have any questions leave a comment and I will get them to Vincent to see if he can answer.

Q1) Tell us a little about yourself Vincent, how did you get involved with .ai?

Vincent Cate: I moved to Anguilla in 1994 and setup an email business. When I tried to register a .ai domain I was told nobody was running it and that I could, so I did.

Q2) Do the citizens of Anguilla know that their local country code has become a global sensation? Does it get any coverage in newspapers or television?

Vincent Cate: This past year everyone heard about it. It was shared all over Facebook, on the newspaper and radio.

Q3) You have some unique rules in your terms of service. I would like to focus on this one, if owner of the site has done any of the above with previous domains (even non .ai domains) we can disable a current domain. Have you ever suspended or taken away a .ai from someone who might have had a gambling site or crypto exchange in something like a .com or .io, etc…?

Vincent Cate: We have actually not had too much trouble because we are not one of the cheapest domains.

Q4) You recently stopped showing registration dates, could this be problematic for UDRP cases and other potential domain disputes?

Vincent Cate: I don’t think it causes them any trouble. The URDP people talk with the registrars and they still have access to that info.

Q5) Is there any thought to maybe lower the registration fees for .ai or make initial one year registrations a possibility?

Vincent Cate: Things are working well the way they are. We have indexed our prices to the CPI index so they have just been going up with inflation.

No, I don’t expect to do one year registrations.