Tuvalu: Licensing of Its .tv Domain Contributes 1/12th To Its Annual Gross National Income

guest · Dec 30, 2019

Tuvalu is a Tiny Island Nation of 11,000 People. Licensing of Its .tv Domain Contributes 1/12th To Its Annual Gross National Income
Tuvalu is a tiny island nation of 11,000 people. It’s cashing in thanks to Twitch
December 30, 2019
https://www.washingtonpost.com/vide...land-nation-people-its-cashing-thanks-twitch/

In 1995, [...] The message was a dispatch informing Tuvalu it had been assigned a country code top-level domain — the string of characters at the end of a URL, like .com or .org — for its Internet addresses. The domain for Tuvalu happened to be “.tv,” the worldwide metonym for broadcast entertainment. At the time, the ultimate significance of the designation was not clear to Boland, nor the others in the office. They had a more pressing question.

Nearly 25 years later, the internet’s full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the island, but its evolution has made Tuvalu’s .tv domain one of its most valuable resources. 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.
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Regardless of their success in the future negotiations, Tuvalu’s citizens should soon be able to start Twitch channels of their own and participate in the streaming frenzy to which their country has been financially tied. Thanks to a World Bank grant, plans are underway to install a submarine fiber optic cable in Tuvalu, drastically increasing the nation’s bandwidth and boosting Internet connectivity.
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Tuvalu: Licensing of Its .tv Domain Contributes 1/12th To Its Annual Gross National Income

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