Buy A .tv Domain and Support the Island of Tuvalu

CultureSurfer.com is hosted by GoDaddy. I am basically happy with their service, other than having to deal with their not so user-friendly web site & having to look at Danica Patrick's photo day in and day out every time I log in to check my CultureSurfer e-mail. Their customer support boys are very nice & really do try to help.

So I called yesterday because we realized we'd better add CultureSurfer.tv to the other domains we now own to prevent squatters---sorry, I meant "domain resellers"--from snatching it and causing problems for us. But I was surprised when customer support boy rattled off the total for my purchase. I asked why it was so expensive. And he told me that Tuvalu OWNS the .tv domain. He jokingly said I could at least take solace in the fact that I was supporting a third-world country. Read on...

tv
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

.tv is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the island nation of Tuvalu. Except for reserved names like .com.tv, .net.tv, .org.tv and others, any person in the world can register a .tv domain for a fee. In 2000, Tuvalu negotiated a contract leasing its Internet domain name ".tv" for $50 million in royalties over a 12-year period.[1] (READ FURTHER ABOUT HOW THIS FELL THROUGH, SO WHO IS GETTING THE CASH NOW???) The Tuvalu government receives a quarterly payment of US$1 million for use of the top-level domain. The domain name is popular, and thus economically valuable, because it is an abbreviation of the word 'television' (other similar ccTLDs are .fm, .am, .cd, and .dj). The domain is currently operated by dotTV, a VeriSign company. The Tuvalu government owns twenty percent of the company.
For a brief period after its creation, all domain names with the letters "AOL" in sequence even with completely random characters before and/or after it were blocked from being registered to prevent misidentification with AOL.

On December 14, 2006, VeriSign announced an alliance with Demand Media, run by ex-MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt to market the .tv Top Level Domain Name (TLD) as the preferred web address for rich media content.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tv

Tuvalu (IPA: [t:u:'valu]), formerly known as the Ellice Islands, is a Polynesian island nation located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia. Its nearest neighbours are Kiribati, Samoa and Fiji...

Tuvalu is a constitutional monarchy and Commonwealth Realm, with Queen Elizabeth II recognised as Queen of Tuvalu....

Tuvalu has almost no natural resources, and its main form of income consists of foreign aid...In 1998, Tuvalu began deriving revenue from use of its area code for "900" lines and from the sale of its ".tv" Internet domain name. In 2000, Tuvalu negotiated a contract leasing its Internet domain name ".tv" for $50 million in royalties. However, the Canadian entrepreneur who negotiated the deal, Jason Chapnik, was unable to raise the $50 million in the contracted time period, and the contract eventually fell into other hands...
The island population has more than doubled since 1980 and was estimated to reach 11,810 in July 2006.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu

Want to know more about the Tuvalu Islands? (Notice it's a .com, not a .tv. )
http://www.tuvaluislands.com/