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The Internet Businesses

Tuvalu is a Tiny Island Nation of 11,000 People. Licensing of Its .tv Domain Contributes 1/12th To Its Annual Gross National Income (washingtonpost.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The internet's full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the tiny island nation Tuvalu (located halfway between Hawaii and Australia), but its evolution has made Tuvalu's .tv domain one of its most valuable resources. From a report: Thanks to the rise of livestreamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu earns about 1/12th of its annual gross national income (GNI) from licensing its domain to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch through the Virginia-based company Verisign. And in 2021, when Tuvalu's contract with Verisign expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher. [...] Compulsory public education has brought the nation's adult literacy rate up to nearly 99 percent, and the World Bank classifies Tuvalu as an upper-middle-income economy, with its territorial fishing rights accounting for the biggest chunk of its GNI at an estimated $19 million in license fees in 2018. But another sizable portion stems directly from its licensing of its .tv URL suffix, thanks to the recent surge in streaming sites. As sites utilizing .tv grow in prominence, Tuvalu's domain on the web may eventually supersede that of its seas.

Few Tuvaluans are able to access the streaming services powered by .tv. The nation's Internet, though widely accessible, is limited to a satellite connection with reduced streaming capacity. However, with more than 140 million people around the world consuming content via Twitch.tv and other streaming platforms, the monetary benefits have helped Tuvalu in more tangible ways than entertainment. "[.tv] has provided a certain, sure income," said Seve Paeniu, Tuvalu's Minister of Finance. "It enables the government to provide essential services to its people through providing schooling and education for the kids, providing medical services to our people, and also in terms of improving the basic economic infrastructure and service delivery to our communities." To monetize .tv, the government of Tuvalu has negotiated a series of agreements allowing foreign companies to market the top-level domain for commercial use. Under the current deal, signed in 2011, Virginia-based network infrastructure firm Verisign pays Tuvalu around $5 million per year for the right to administer .tv. For a nation whose annual domestic revenues tend to hover around $60 million, this is a substantial benefit.
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Tuvalu is a Tiny Island Nation of 11,000 People. Licensing of Its .tv Domain Contributes 1/12th To Its Annual More

Tuvalu is a Tiny Island Nation of 11,000 People. Licensing of Its .tv Domain Contributes 1/12th To Its Annual

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  • What kind of money do they make off the .cx domain? And how much does Italy make off .it? The mind boggles.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      I haven't seen anyone use a .cx domain in a goat's age. Even .io is more popular.

      And about that satellite internet connection? There's a guy named Musk who they should talk to in the next couple of years, once he gets a ground station in Australia.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rossdee ( 243626 )

      Christmas Island is not an independent nation, its used by Australia as a refugee camp for asians who try to get to Australia.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by quenda ( 644621 )

      What kind of money do they make off the .cx domain?

      Probably not a lot, given that even *they* don't bother to use their domain.

      https://www.christmas.net.au/ [christmas.net.au]

      Calling Tuvalu an "independent nation" is a bit of a joke, when more of their money comes from foreign aid and remittances. That their domain name is significant income is just icing on the cake.

  • Eritrea, (.er)are you reading this? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by De_Boswachter ( 905895 ) on Monday December 30, 2019 @10:11AM (#59570416) Homepage
    If only Eritrea would be able to climb out of its spiral of violence and corruption. They would make an even bigger buck with their .er top-level domain name. So many more words and names end with er.

  • Which, of course, was never the point of top level country domains.

    Not that I blame them. But I'm genuinely surprised that no do gooders get up in arms about it. Isn't this "cultural appropriation"?

  • Says a lot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) * on Monday December 30, 2019 @10:16AM (#59570446)
    Most people born on Tuvalu are trying to get the hell out of Tuvalu... smaller Pacific islands never recovered from the collapse of the copra industry. They don't make so much money because of the internet, it's because their GDP is so small that internet income is such a big chunk... GDP per capita a whopping $3000.

    • Plus which, Tuvalu may not be above sea level much longer. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_Tuvalu/ [wikipedia.org]

      Will it be able to maintain its existence as a nation? It won't go the way of Sealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand/ [wikipedia.org] , since the U.N. only screws over artificial islands. Perhaps Atlantis and Lemuria should apply for couintry domains as well.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
        Good thing they have a couple hundred years to move out or prepare... Sea level rise for them is much less devastating for the residents than say, nuclear testing in the Bikini atoll...where everyone was moved out by force within a very short period. They have plenty of time to prepare - it is quite possible to have an entire nation almost entirely under sea level - Holland proves that. But it's not going to happen. It's much easier to sit around and complain and beg for money/help than to actually address

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          Not sure how a nation of 11,000 people are going to fix global sea level rise.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
            Where there's a will there's a way. 11,000 people don't need as much fixing as several million, either.
      • Perhaps you missed it but from previous discussions on Slashdot this was shown to have no evidence to support it. Especially since the land mass of Tuvalu is increasing rather than reducing and the tide station at Tuvalu show no rise in the oceans. There are a few Henny Penny's like yourself however.

  • Then I immediately become skeptical.

    (I'll accept co.uk as well)

  • The officiall TLD NIC of the United States of America with the apt name.

  • I'm changing the name of my island to "Count Island".

  • Tuvalu gets very few tourists (Score:5, Interesting)

    by olddoc ( 152678 ) on Monday December 30, 2019 @11:09AM (#59570676)
    There was just an article on CNN.com about places with the least number of tourists: https://www.cnn.com/travel/art... [cnn.com] Tuvalu got only 2,000 visitors in all of 2017. By comparison, Eritrea had 140,000 in 2016. This makes me want to go to Tuvalu!
    • Not for lack of effort. Your search engine will reveal that most of sites that come up are tourism related. Perhaps they should premiere the notion of Geographical Extinction Tourism. They can be the first on a long list, if climate change predictions are accurate.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Speare ( 84249 )
      The YouTuber "Yes Theory" decided to travel there and show a hint of island life in Tuvalu. Definitely worth seeing, though of course it can't show every facet of life there based on an outsider's three day stay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • The summary says "the World Bank classifies Tuvalu as an upper-middle-income economy." Google says "Of the nation's inhabitants (not including persons employed outside of Tuvalu), only about 1,500 are formally employed. The average per capita income is only about US$1,000 per year, making Tuvalu one of the poorest nations on earth."

    Which is it? Have they been suddenly lifted from poverty to wealth by their domain name?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      You can travel to any country on earth these days, in the tallest tower in the city, nearly everyone is making $30,000 usd, with 100+ making $100,000 usd. They live in the big houses and the income for that one tower, usually administrating foreign interests in the companies running big industry there, make a double-digit percentage of the city's wealth. Everyone else is cooking their food over burning trash and struggles to have access to clean drinking water. There's a reason why the finance district is t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      The World Bank is charged with inflicting debt peonage on every country they can get their claws into, if they classified Tuvalu as "poor" then they wouldn't be able to make high-interest loans to them.

  • Not that I can remember ever visiting any page with a .tv TLD name, but I honestly thought '.tv' was a TLD for sites about television.
  • I remember a friend was working on a project to help the government of Cameroon set up their national domain (.cm) to typosquat popular .com addresses [wikipedia.org].

  • Obviously, we didn't actually hold a conversation because it's 6,800 miles away from me and my antenna is wire and pvc pipe strung between trees. But, we made contact and told each other how well we were getting the signal/our location then I looked him up online. The guy lives in Fiji and makes trips to Rotuma. At least sporadically he goes to Tuvalu.

    There is ONE ham radio operator who lives locally on the island and he runs an old furuno ship radio he repurposed for amateur radio. People have donated ot

  • ...they aren't actually shrinking, or this would be a tragedy...

    https://phys.org/news/2018-02-... [phys.org]

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