Whither Tuvalu?

The sea has been rising and will pretty clearly continue to rise.  This is not cause for immediate concern to citizens of Utah or Kyrgyzstan, but it's of great concern to citizens of countries such as Maldives (highest elevation 2.3 meters) or Kiribati (a few meters).  Or Tuvalu (4.5 meters).

Bear in mind that an island nation does not have to be completely inundated to become uninhabitable.  As the sea rises, the water inland becomes brackish and plants stop growing.  Storms become more destructive.  Even normal tides can become problematic and, leaving that aside, the amount of land, say, two meters above the sea will typically be dramatically less than the amount one meter above the sea.  It's a serious concern.

The Economist considers the worst case of an island nation becoming completely uninhabitable.  International law is unclear on this, there not being a lot of precedent, but the article speculates that, while the residents of the nation may be displaced and the nation itself no longer meet the criteria of having a clear territory or a permanent population, yet a nation might still remain a legal entity.  This matters because under this scenario the nation would still retain assets.

The most obvious asset is the territorial claim under the law of the sea (mainly territorial waters of 12 nautical miles and an economic zone of 200 nautical miles), but in the case of Tuvalu there is also the .tv domain (Maldives and Kiribati have their own domains of course, but haven't been able to exploit them economically the way Tuvalu has).  I've written before about how this didn't pan out to be quite the bonanza it was originally hoped to be, but according to Wikipedia it does bring in $4 million a year, or about $400 per year per capita under a contract expiring around 2012.

It's not clear what price the domain might fetch in the next round of negotiations, and in any case it would be small compensation for losing one's homeland, but amid all the sadness it's remarkable that perhaps some day the proceeds from a piece of virtual real estate will help sustain a virtual nation.

Goodbye, TLDs?

When I saw the headline "'Shake-up' for internet proposed," I immediately thought "IPv6", but in fact it's about a proposal to relax the restrictions on the top-level domains (TLDs). Currently there are just under 300, including the well-known .com, national domains (.us etc.), the moderately obscure (.coop) and the experimental (.xn--deba0ad).

As it stands, ICANN strictly controls this list and seldom touches it. If you want foo.com, all you have to do is make sure no one else has it (that one's taken, of course) and pay a small fee. But if you want foo.bar, you're out of luck. There is no .bar on the official TLD list.

Under the new scheme, you could claim .bar for your very own, so long as you could show a "business plan and technical capacity". And, um, pay several thousand dollars at a minimum and more if you get into a bidding war. In theory, this opens up vast new areas of virtual real estate and greatly blurs the line between TLDs and domains in general.

While it will be nice to have internationalized names (.xn-deba0ad spells "test" in Yiddish), I expect that .com will continue to rule the roost for quite some time, though .xxx will doubtless spark a land rush. For all the talk of running out of domain names, .com and the web have become inextricably linked. See .tv for a cautionary tale.

Who wants to be on .TV?

I seem to remember -- and maybe this is just my addled memories of Silicon Valley playing tricks on me -- that all the good .com names were supposed to have been snapped up years ago in some great virtual land rush. The only viable alternative was to grab a domain from one of the newly-minted top-level-domains, like maybe .biz, or hey wait, there's an island nation called Tuvalu and guess what! Its TLD is .tv!

Station managers! Why use your-call-letters.com when you could use your-call-letters.tv? Why use your-favorite-show.com? Doesn't your-favorite-show.tv sound so much better? In those fin-de-siecle years, dreams and fortunes were made of less.

Current statistics from Name Intelligence, of course, tell a somewhat different story:

TLD	Registered domains (millions)
.COM	71
.NET	11
.ORG	6
.INFO	5
.BIZ	2
.US	1

Stats for other TLDs are harder to track down, but clearly they're at least 2 orders of magnitude behind .com.

There does appear to be another effort in the works to get people buying .tv (the page I linked is a redirect from www.tv). Certain "premium" domains are up for sale at premium prices. Annual fees range from $500,000 for business.tv to $100 for, say, fishness.tv. I was intrigued by rotten.tv, but not $3000 a year worth of intrigued. Non-premium names, I believe, go for a more usual fee of around $25. The full list of 52,000+ premium names makes for somewhat entertaining browsing.

What of Tuvalu? The nation of 11,000 gets a cut of revenues from its agreement with Verisign. Being extremely remote, having few natural resources and having its highest point around 5 meters above (current) sea level, it can certainly use the cash. However, there is concern that the cut could be larger. From what I can make out, the total comes to around $2M a year, better than nothing, but at around $200 per person certainly not the bonanza one might have hoped for.

The official site for Tuvalu is www.gov.tv, but be aware that their server appears very slow, possibly due to high latency as much as low bandwidth.