Tuvalu Makes $4M a Year | Hacker News Reader

Tuvalu Makes $4M a Year

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18 pointsjwdmsd115 comments

To complete the title: "Tuvalu Makes $4M/yr from the .tv Domain".

From a December 2019 Washington Post article[1], there are ~500,000 registered .tv domains. The math on that works out to license fees of ~$8/domain ($4M/500k).

Considering .com is around $10/yr and .tv is around $30/yr[2], I'm interested to know where the incremental $12 goes ($30 - $8 - $10).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2019/12/23/tuvalu...

[2] Namecheap

> I'm interested to know where the incremental $12 goes

Uh everyone thats not the passive royalties holder? What answer do you really want?

Obviously. More to the point, what other incremental costs exist, if any, that would account for a $20 premium in price when cost appears to be going up by $8?

most likely all profit for incumbents supported by high barriers of entry for a small market.

Little recompense in the face of losing their nation to the carbon-emitting activities of large nations, who do not admit them as refugees.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/will-tuvalu-di...

Why are you linking a 16 years old article that has been proven wrong? Tuvalu is not shrinking or sinking.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-19/fact-check-is-the-isl...

> Isn’t it amazing that a country that’s merely a speck in ocean ... controls something so crucial to the internet world?!

I spit my tea out bahaha

But on a more "substantive" note, I think I did a case study 12 years ago about what an invasion of Tuvalu could look like - by private persons, and we mapped out their satellite and internet infrastructure for how to disable that. I had only ever heard of the country because of this TLD and looking it up.

Somewhere in a paper file I have the faxes that I exchanged with the office of the Prime Minister of Tuvalu back in about 1995 trying to explain the value of their TLD and how my (little) company could help them monetize it. Embarrassingly, I just got busy with client projects and ghosted them... It's nice to see that they are seeing substantial revenue from the domain now, and stand to see more when their agreement with Verisign expires next year.

Just curious, what strategies were you going to take to help them build it out, and just how much "build out" were you planning to do?

And just to be clear, I don't mean this in a sarcastic cynical way. I am genuinely curious on how people built out such platforms and surrounding infrastructure during the initial build-up of the WWW.

This led me to look up whether the British Indian Ocean Territory (Chagos Islands), and therefore the British Government, received any money as a result of the .io domain.

It appears not. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io

[1] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/ldtoday/writtens/11...

The British shouldn't get money, but the Chagosians forcibly evicted by the British probably deserve it more than most: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagossians#Eviction

Sad that they aren't seeing a penny, apparently.

It's amazing to me that British seem to get the full PR whack of that attrocity when it was all under the auspices of the US who paid the Brits to kick them out.

Kind of like how we all collectively forget that the Allies dropped the bomb on Japan and not just the "Americans".

TIL that the Americans consulted with the British before dropping the bomb on Hiroshima (but declined their request for British participation in the mission). The Soviets were apparently not notified in advance (although I could be wrong about that) and the British had veto power over what would be revealed to the Soviets about the bombing.

I didn’t know any one else was consulted in any serious manner about the Japanese bombings. From the other poster it appears the UK was heavily involved? It’s def more than the US, but if only them, then not all of the “Allies” unless we’re only considering the US and UK the “Allies”. In the end though, both cases had both countries. Not to mention other situations in the world like the Middle East.

Not sure if America had anything to do with India. Probably not.

https://www.wired.com/1998/09/tuvalu/

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