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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

A really big looming question is what will happen to all the .tv domains, which provide 95% of Tuvalu's GDP (similar to how .ai is for Anguilla). The island is getting warn away by rougher seas and the ocean level is rising thanks to climate change.

What happens when the island no longer exists? Does the country still exist? Should the .tv domain still exist?

When Yugoslavia broke up they shut down its TLD, but this would be .... different?

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.su still exists.

According to this article I found, Tuvaluans are trying to maintain their statehood and maritime rights once they no longer have land. It's uncharted territory for the UN but it strikes me as pretty likely (plus it's a bad look to not throw a bone to a country that the rest of the world played a part in destroying).

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/11/tuvalu-seeks-t...

My prediction is the TLD stays and revenues go to the entity that is the Tuvaluan government (probably based in Australia at that point)

Tuvalu is also working on a land reclamation project that is designed to keep at least some land above the projected storm surges beyond the year 2100.

They've also amended their constitution in an attempt to maintain statehood even if rising sea levels do overtake the island:

https://www.economist.com/asia/2023/10/12/tuvalu-plans-for-i...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Tuvalu#The_cli...

> which provide 95% of Tuvalu's GDP

Source? I've never seen this number before. I've seen 8.4% of government revenue, and ~1/12 of GNI but never 95% of GDP...

For what it's worth, I have found this source [0]: "The deal with a US firm called DotTV effectively trebled Tuvalu's national income."

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2000/sep/10/business....

Well, fuck.yu became fuck.me

There is at least one landless sovereign entity at the moment[1], but they don't have a ccTLD as far as I know.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_...

Tuvalu is getting larger, not smaller. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1

Soviet Union (.su) it's still around. Even if Tuvalu disappears (it won't) someone else would take care of the TLD.

В связи с геополитическими изменениями домен pos.su переименован в pos.ru

Kind of a stranger fart joke, what it says is that because of the geopolitical changes the domains will be renamed. But the first one can be read as "I'll piss" and the second one "I'll poop".

I’m sure since it would no longer be a country TLD, you could easily say it’s a media TLD. Crisis averted. However, registrar responsibilities would be elsewhere. Google perhaps. Or maybe someone else. I’m sure that .tv is so ubiquitous that it falls under several categories.

That would be a possible solution but they would have to agree to change the rules for TLDs or make an exception, because right now the rules are very clear that only countries can have two letter TLDs.

Yes, and like previous countries that are no more, the TLDs still exist. We just need some international entity to keep processing the registrations.

* and the EU, and Antarctica (.aq)

Also `.gb`, which is an island.

Then you get into British Overseas Territories (like Anguilla!) and French Overseas Departments (e.g. Reunion). Are they countries? Sort of, but not really?

Even within the UK it's tricky. Is Scotland a country? I don't think so, but a lot of Scots do.

This is a myth. They did a study last decade that showed Tuvalu is actually gaining landmass.

[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-02-pacific-nation-bigger.html

The PM at the time took contention to the publication of that article, saying that there was no increase in actual habitable land.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190326140508/https://kmt.news/...

Yup. The study suggests that it's just the peaks getting higher, which means that even the peaks will become harder to build on as they become steeper.

Useful inhabitable landmass is the question I guess? If it's just the peaks of the island getting higher, then that land becomes increasingly hard to build on.

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