Many of the island nations in the Pacific Ocean have a hard time maintaining their economies. They're often isolated, tiny, with small populations, and most of their needs are met through expensive imports.
This poses a huge problem for these countries. How do you build industries, provide jobs, and create enough income for your people, so that your economy doesn't collapse?
The country of Tuvalu is no exception to these issues.
Tuvalu is extremely small! It's the fourth smallest country in the world, and has a population of about 11.000 people. The nation is located about halfway between Australia and Hawaii, so it's pretty isolated from the rest of the world.
The main island is a small atoll, that at its widest is only 600 meters across, and space is so limited that when not used for flights, the airport runway is also used as a public park and recreational space.
Tuvalu also has the lowest GDP of any country in the world. Not unusual for a country like this, but that does mean that the people there are quite poor.
A lot of the other Pacific island countries rely on tourism for most of their income, but it's particularly tough to get to Tuvalu. There are only three flights a week from Nadi in Fiji, and this trip alone costs about $800 round trip! Not exactly a budget destination.
So how do the people in Tuvalu earn their money?
Well, mainly from fishing. Not only do 42% of Tuvaluans work in the fishing industry, but the country also has a massive exclusive economic zone (EEZ). This means that Tuvalu has exclusive rights to all the resources here, and they also sell fishing licenses to foreign ships. This provides a significant portion of the government's income, but the country's most interesting source of income came from random chance!
The International Organization for Standardization sets the standards for pretty much everything in the world, from a cup of tea, all the way to shipping containers. One of them is standard 3166, which defines two letter codes for each country in the world. So for example japan got JP, the Netherlands got NL, and Guatemala got GT.
And then the internet got invented!
In every internet address there is a top-level domain, which is the last part of a domain name, names such as .com, .org, and .net.
Starting in 1985, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (another creatively named organization), which assigns top-level domains, started creating top-level domains for specific countries. The way they did this was by taking the ISO 3166 list, and simply taking the pre-set codes for each country.
And this is where Tuvalu got extremely lucky! Their code was tv, and this made their top-level domain .tv.
As you can imagine this is the perfect domain name for any video or streaming based website, and so Tuvalu started licensing its domain name. Originally a company called DotTv bought the licensing rights for the .tv domain, but in 2002 this company was bought by the giant internet company Verisign. Verisign is the registrar for a lot of popular top-level domains, including .com, .net, and now .tv.
It is estimated that Tuvalu now receives about about $5 million every year in licensing fees, and for a country with a GDP of $45 million, this is more than 10% of their entire annual income!
And thanks to the popularity of streaming giant Twitch.tv, the value of the .tv domain name is expected to increase in value, which might eventually be worth more than their fishing income!
The money has gone to crucial development on the islands, and has allowed Tuvalu to join the United Nations, because they could finally afford the $100.000 joining fee.
Ironically when Tuvalu was first assigned its top-level domain, they didn't really know what to with it! Even today internet speeds are extremely slow for users in Tuvalu, because the islands are not connected to one of the giant fiber optic sub-sea cables that connect the rest of the world to each other. This means that for now Tuvalu has to rely on expensive satellite internet, but in 2019 Tuvalu received a grant from the World Bank to finally connect it to the rest of the world!
Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this article!