Tuvalu sets up to rule the waves

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): As Pacific island micro-states go, Tuvalu is a relatively well-run place. Its 9,200 people scratch a modest living (about US$500 a year per capita) from bread-fruit, castor- oil fish and copra, and the government covers its equally modest budget of $5 million a year from fees paid by foreign fishing boats. The only problem is that the country is likely to disappear within the next couple of generations.

Almost all the land surface of Tuvalu's nine small coral atolls is only 6 to 9 ft. (2 to 3 meters) above sea level. If global warming has the expected results in terms of melting icecaps and thermal expansion of the oceans, then rising sea levels will mean that the waves will be washing right across Tuvalu on a regular basis before another century is out. And where do the people go then?

If they have enough money in the bank, that shouldn't be a problem -- so the government, naturally enough, is obsessed with earning enough money now to take care of the population then. Its first foray into the world of international commerce, however, ended in severe embarrassment for the devoutly Christian Tuvaluans.

The idea was to exploit Tuvalu's only major economic resource: its status as a sovereign state. As such, it can make a certain amount of money from stamp and currency collectors -- and maybe a great deal of money from somebody who wants to use its international telephone access code.

It seemed like money from heaven: a billion dollars a year from some foreign telephone-sales company that simply wanted to avoid the annoying regulations that larger countries impose on their telephone networks. The contract was signed in 1966 -- and shortly afterwards Tuvaluans realized that their access code had become the world's premier site for international "adult" sex calls.

So it was back to the drawing board -- and two months ago they came up with what looks like a real winner. For the domain name assigned to Tuvalu by the Internet central registry, is (wait for it!) -- .tv

In theory, at least, there ought to be lots of broadcasters in the world who would like to have an Internet address with .tv at the end: bbc.tv, cnn.tv, abc.tv, etc. So Tuvalu put the domain name out for bids, and two months ago a Canadian company called www.internet.tv beat out American and British competitors and signed an exclusive contract to sell the suffix to the world.

"Our people are already dreaming about what to do with the money," said Prime Minister Bikenibeau Paeniu. The amount in question? Between $60 million and $100 million a year, according to the forecasts of Jason Chapnik, the entrepreneur who owns www.internet.tv.

This seems like rather a lot of money to pay for what are, in the end, just a couple of letters, but Chapnik is sure that the clients are there. Each one would be expected to pay $1,000 up front, he told a press conference in Toronto recently, and then there will be an annual $500 renewal fee. But if more than one customer wanted the same name, then he'd open it to bidding and the sky would be the limit.

"There is nothing else you could invent that could be better than .tv" Chapnik said. "...The interest in .tv is uncanny from all over the world." And one suspects that he might actually be right, for there has always been money to be made by figuring out the names that people and companies will be wanting to use in the future, and getting the rights on them now.

One of the most popular magazines in Victorian Britain, for example, was called The Nineteenth Century -- but somebody else registered the name The Twentieth Century before the magazine's publishers thought of it. They refused to pay the price he demanded for it, but only managed to struggle on for a few years past 1900 as The Nineteenth Century and After before the publication died of embarrassment.

In the same way, it is alleged that somebody other than the relevant film production company has registered the name 21st Century Fox, and is just waiting for the price to be right. There is certainly a thriving business in buying up Internet domain names for the ordinary commercial (.com) suffix at $100 each (one entrepreneur is sitting on 15,000 names, or $1.5 million worth), and then retailing them to interested users for much, much more.

So it is not beyond credibility that television broadcasters, producers, and personalities (or 'actors', as they were once known) will stump up the kind of money for the .tv suffix that will meet Tuvalu's expectations. This is, after all, the world of hype, and if enough big outfits start using .tv after their names, then all the smaller players will be desperate to prove that they are in the same league by using it too.

If the money rolls in as planned, and if Tuvalu's government invests it wisely, then by the time their original homeland sinks beneath the waves the Tuvaluans should be able to afford somewhere else to live. And even then they would presumably be able to retain the suffix and continue to profit from it, though the place to which it referred only existed in cyberspace.

In which case, Tuvalu has an interesting future ahead of it, as the world's first virtual country.