The Economics of Everyday Things

Who decides which snacks are in your office’s vending machine? How much is a suburban elm tree worth, and to whom? How did Girl Scout Cookies become a billion-dollar business? In bite-sized episodes, journalist Zachary Crockett looks at quotidian things and finds amazing stories. Join the Freakonomics Radio Plus membership program for weekly member-only episodes of Freakonomics Radio. You’ll also get every show in our network without ads. To sign up, visit our show page on Apple Podcasts or go to freakonomics.com/plus.

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episode 43: 43. Top-Level Domains


Those letters at the end of web addresses can mean big bucks — and, for some small countries, a substantial part of the national budget. Zachary Crockett follows the links.

 

  • SOURCES:
    • Vince Cate, technical contact for the .ai domain in Anguilla.
    • Kim Davies, Vice President of Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Services and President of Public Technical Identifiers at ICANN.
    • Tianyu Fang, contributing editor at Reboot.

 

  • RESOURCES:
    • "The Two-Decade Fight for Two Letters on the Internet," by Jacob Judah (The New York Times, 2024).
    • "Whose Domain Is It?" by Tianyu Fang (Reboot, 2023).
    • "How a Tiny Pacific Island Became the Global Capital of Cybercrime," by Jacob Judah (MIT Technology Review, 2023).
    • "The Tropical Island With the Hot Domain Name," by Rachel Metz (Bloomberg, 2023).
    • "The Never-ending ccTLD Story," by Peter K. Yu (SSRN, 2003).


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