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.
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).