Tuvalu Makes $4M a Year (opens in new tab)

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

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...

> 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.

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...