Issue 6.09 - Sep 1998
Buy This Domain
Tuvalu's .tv stands to radically upgrade the country's $10 million GDP.
By Andrew Raskin
To see the top man in Tuvalu, you stroll into the government's yellow-washed cement-block headquarters on the island of Funafuti. Ten people just inside tap away on PCs - treasury workers handling the South Pacific nationette's tiny accounts. You head down the hall and through an outdoor passage to a rear wing that looks out on Funafuti's jewel, a 10-mile-wide lagoon. A laser-printed sign advises, "Offices behind this door are the Attorney General, the Assistant Secretary General, the Secretary to Government, and the Prime Minister."
On the other side of the door, a man dressed like the rest of the male staff, in slacks, short-sleeve shirt, and sandals, converses with a secretary outside the prime minister's office. Inquiry discloses that the wide-waisted figure - mouth beard-fringed, a smile setting off what looks like a fighter's scarred nose - is Bikenibeu Paeniu, the head of the government.
That's all it takes. No guards, no metal detectors, no identity checks. Prime Minister Paeniu gladly holds forth on everything from his hobbies to how to preserve his people's sense of community. "The education and training of my people - that is the top priority in my mind," he says in a voice just touched with a British accent. He allows that he enjoys visiting the weekly dances - in Tuvalu, they're called twists - at Funafuti's only hotel. The visit's ease almost makes you forget the three-day New York-Los Angeles-Fiji-Funafuti air trek that brought you to Paeniu's door.
In June, just before Tuvalu's air-conditioned winter solstice, a small group of strangers made the trip to see the prime minister. They climbed off Air Marshall Islands turboprops in a capital so remote and so tenuous - Funafuti's highest point is 15 feet above sea level - that its chief interest might be how soon it will vanish beneath seas raised by global warming.
The visitors landed on a sliver of coral hundreds of miles from anyplace the average National Geographic reader can find on a map. They were there to make a real-estate deal. The property they sought? A two-letter piece of virtual territory they vow will earn millions for a country that counts its wealth in coconuts, fish, fresh air, and foreign aid. The 10,000 or so people who scratch a living from Tuvalu's 10 square miles - nine atolls speckled across 400 miles of ocean north of Fiji - enjoy a yearly gross domestic product of US$10 million.
The cyber parcel the visitors were trying to talk Paeniu and his government into mining - the top-level domain .tv - will be marketed to television companies as an alternative to the ubiquitous but nondescript .com. Just how much will television moguls pay for a name like Fox.tv? The idea is presumed to be so rich that five parties from three continents showed up to make pitches. Three other outfits filed bids to help Tuvalu develop the domain. One high-profile company, Microsoft-owned WebTV, kept out of the bidding after a failed preemptive grab at the domain.
They came, they hung out by the lagoon, they drank cold beverages on a concrete patio. And when they were gone, Paeniu and a panel of experts chose finalists.
At Deal Central, the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel, most hands are held close to the vest.
On the Vaiaku Lagi's patio, Zentaro Ohashi shows off a prize: a big flounder he has just grabbed, barehanded, from the reef edging the lagoon. Hideto Kuribayashi, well-tanned heir to a century-old Japanese trading company, sits at a table nearby. He is rehearsing a talk he must give, in English, to Paeniu and the Tuvalu Top-Level Domain Task Force. The subject of his discourse, naturally, is how his company, Nanyo Boeki, will spin gold from .tv.
"We are very appreciated to having such a opportunity to present you our propose," Kuribayashi intones. Ohashi might help. He lives in the Bay Area, serving as vice president of a Web consulting firm called Netyear, and his English is fluent. But he is also Kuribayashi's rival, and neither man acknowledges the other.
Ohashi also encounters Joseph Kim, a UC Berkeley graduate who started his own company, Ipcom, to bid for .tv. By his own account, Kim's informal style has gotten him into trouble with Prime Minister Paeniu. "When I see him walking, I'll say, 'Hey, Prime Minister.' I think he's not used to that," Kim reflects.
Now Ohashi is on the receiving end of a pointed Kim query. "So what are you going to do about Rubin?" Kim asks, referring to a WebTV executive who at one point managed to get administrative control of .tv without the government in Tuvalu knowing about it. "We're just going to pretend he doesn't exist," Ohashi responds. Later, he admits he has no idea who Rubin is.
Both Ohashi and Kim are old .tv hands. In 1995, Ohashi faxed Funafuti, proposing to help the government market the domain. Until Ohashi's fax, life in Tuvalu went on untouched by the strange new realities created when the International Organization for Standardization's two-letter country codes were adopted as top-level domains for every nation in the world. Most of the ISO 3166 codes are straightforward and innocuous: .us for the United States, .de for Deutschland. With Network Solutions' exclusive contract with the US government to administer .com - and that generic domain's early popularity - several of the national domains suddenly looked like they had profit potential. For instance, in a world obsessed with trademark integrity, Turkmenistan's .tm looked like pay dirt.
James Conway, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was working as a consultant to Tuvalu's minister of finance when Ohashi's message came in. "Out of the fax came this note from a guy in New York proposing to help Tuvalu market .tv," he says. "I wasn't here so long that I hadn't heard about the Internet, but this one-page fax mentioned stuff like top-level domains and .tv. I was like, 'What is this person talking about?'"
What Ohashi was talking about was marketing .tv to broadcasters in the United States and Japan in return for a share of the take. All Tuvalu had to do was tell the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority that Ohashi had been appointed to handle .tv and he would begin setting up accounts. But as Conway recounts, "Nobody knew about .tv then, and we didn't follow it up."
Kim, in 1996 a Silicon Valley programmer, starred in the sequel. "I was scanning the list of ISO 3166 country codes, and I was like, 'Wow! TV!'" An online database, though, showed that IANA had given administrative authority for .tv to Andrew Rubin, manager of communications software for WebTV. But Kim noticed something he thought was strange: No .tv names were being sold. So he called Funafuti. "I got in touch with the finance secretary, and I said this guy Andrew Rubin is not maximizing your revenue. And he was like, 'Who is Andrew Rubin?'"
That's the question Paeniu asked, too, when, returning as prime minister in early 1997 after three-plus years leading the opposition, he followed up on some advice he had gotten during a fellowship at Australian National University: Make something out of .tv. He was shocked to learn an outsider held sway over the domain (a control IANA rescinded when Tuvalu appealed earlier this year). Soon, though, Paeniu was being courted. First, WebTV reportedly tried to settle its claim to .tv by offering the government $10,000 for every name registered to the domain. That offer was rejected, and others followed. Proposals rolled in from the US, Canada, Japan, England, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Australia.
Realizing he was out of his depth in assessing the deals, Paeniu, who holds a master's degree in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Hawaii, asked the International Telecommunication Union to assign a consultant. The person who got the job was Antony Van Couvering, president of the US subsidiary of UK-based NetNames, a domain-registration firm. As marketer for two national domains with potential commercial value - Turkmenistan's .tm and American Samoa's .as (valued in Scandinavia as a parallel to the A.S. that denotes an incorporated entity) - the company had experience with the issues Tuvalu faced. Van Couvering's verdict, delivered last February: Scrap all pending proposals, some of which he judged real scams, and start over with a task force following a carefully laid-out bidding process. Paeniu went along with the advice, Van Couvering withdrew as consultant so his company could bid on .tv, and the domain strangers started visiting Tuvalu.
Paeniu approaches the promise of .tv riches warily. Past deals involving passports and phone numbers explain why.
A few years ago, Hong Kong's Asia Pacific Telecom rented Tuvalu's unused phone numbers, resold them to offshore customers, and shared the profit with the government. The sun shone brightly on the agreement at first. Clouds appeared, though, when it became known that some of the rented numbers were being used for phone-sex lines. In a country that styles itself devoutly Christian and sports a national anthem paying extended tribute to the Almighty, the news didn't sit well.
A second scheme, in which the government sells passports to Hong Kong citizens who might want to hold papers from a British Commonwealth country, has proceeded without moral taint. But neither has it produced much wealth.
"I've personally learned a very good lesson from that," says Paeniu. "When we first hit on the passport deal, my hopes were raised that we'd earn millions of dollars a year, but we're really not getting the cream we're supposed to get."
Although he doesn't mention it, Paeniu and his fellow islanders have another reason to take a guarded stance toward the promise of .tv wealth: So far, none of the entrepreneurial attempts to turn national domains into commercial riches has resulted in a big score. NetNames says that .tm registrations were temporarily halted because some customers set up sex sites, a practice displeasing to Turkmenistan's Muslim régime. On the other hand, .as is attracting more than 500 new accounts a month for $90, two-year registrations. BRS Media hit upon the idea of selling .fm - the domain of the Federated States of Micronesia - to FM stations. The haul, company president George Bundy says, is expected by year's end to be $150,000 from 750 stations who have paid $200 each for a two-year signup. Bill Semich, president of an outfit formed to market .nu for the tinier-than-Tuvalu South Pacific nation of Niue, says he has moved 15,000 names at $25 per year.
But these deals sound like chump change when you compare them with what is promised when .tv goes live: tens of millions of dollars - for starters. The Tuvalu domain may have special power, but Semich says his experience with .nu has taught him something about consumer preferences. "Users have come to think that the www and the .com are necessary in an Internet name," he says.
"Network Solutions essentially has a branding monopoly with .com - .com is like Coca-Cola and the others aren't even Royal Crown. They're like supermarket brands."
When the Tuvalu Top-Level Domain Task Force picked three finalists in July, Zentaro Ohashi's bid wasn't among them. Neither was Joseph Kim's. But NetNames, offering a revenue split that could bring $150 million to Tuvalu over the next decade, made the cut. So did another UK firm, Ixtel. The big buzz, though, surrounded Canada's Information.CA, which promised $50 million in advance for the contract.
"This seems like a gift from God," Paeniu says of the bids as the decision nears. He says if he has his way the cash will be used to establish a scholarship for study at universities overseas. He also says a chunk of the money might be used to upgrade transportation in and out of Tuvalu. And some of the windfall, Paeniu emphasizes, should go into a trust fund set up by foreign-aid donors to give Tuvalu stable future income.
The night before most of them depart Funafuti, the .tv hopefuls wash down sashimi with big cans of Foster's on the Vaiaku Lagi's patio. Paeniu is seated at the table where earlier Hideto Kuribayashi struggled with his rehearsal. Kuribayashi, who sits across from the prime minister, is subdued. The task force couldn't decipher parts of his oral presentation. No matter - he will get to provide a written explanation. The party, enlivened by the joking of Foreign Affairs Secretary Pokia Tihala, quiets as Paeniu launches into a parable.
"Some years ago, a boy no older than 14 was fishing out between the islands, and he lost his way at sea," Paeniu relates. "The boy lived for a week or so by catching fish and drinking the blood, but after some time he couldn't find anymore fish. Suddenly, a huge wave washed over the boy and flipped his canoe upside down. Eventually the seas calmed down and the boy was able to turn the canoe back upright. And when he pulled himself out of the water, weak and starving, the boy found to his surprise that his canoe was filled with fish. He lived for 45 days before being rescued, and returned to Tuvalu a very religious man."
Is .tv a canoe full of money?
The answer lies in how the television world answers an impatient aside Tihala utters as he sits at the Vaiaku Lagi's bar gazing at a commercial for CNN Interactive on the tube.
"CNN.com?" he shakes his head. "No, no. How about CNN.tv?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Raskin ([email protected]) is a freelance writer based in New York.
Buy This Domain
Tuvalu's .tv stands to radically upgrade the country's $10 million GDP.
By Andrew Raskin
To see the top man in Tuvalu, you stroll into the government's yellow-washed cement-block headquarters on the island of Funafuti. Ten people just inside tap away on PCs - treasury workers handling the South Pacific nationette's tiny accounts. You head down the hall and through an outdoor passage to a rear wing that looks out on Funafuti's jewel, a 10-mile-wide lagoon. A laser-printed sign advises, "Offices behind this door are the Attorney General, the Assistant Secretary General, the Secretary to Government, and the Prime Minister."
On the other side of the door, a man dressed like the rest of the male staff, in slacks, short-sleeve shirt, and sandals, converses with a secretary outside the prime minister's office. Inquiry discloses that the wide-waisted figure - mouth beard-fringed, a smile setting off what looks like a fighter's scarred nose - is Bikenibeu Paeniu, the head of the government.
That's all it takes. No guards, no metal detectors, no identity checks. Prime Minister Paeniu gladly holds forth on everything from his hobbies to how to preserve his people's sense of community. "The education and training of my people - that is the top priority in my mind," he says in a voice just touched with a British accent. He allows that he enjoys visiting the weekly dances - in Tuvalu, they're called twists - at Funafuti's only hotel. The visit's ease almost makes you forget the three-day New York-Los Angeles-Fiji-Funafuti air trek that brought you to Paeniu's door.
In June, just before Tuvalu's air-conditioned winter solstice, a small group of strangers made the trip to see the prime minister. They climbed off Air Marshall Islands turboprops in a capital so remote and so tenuous - Funafuti's highest point is 15 feet above sea level - that its chief interest might be how soon it will vanish beneath seas raised by global warming.
The visitors landed on a sliver of coral hundreds of miles from anyplace the average National Geographic reader can find on a map. They were there to make a real-estate deal. The property they sought? A two-letter piece of virtual territory they vow will earn millions for a country that counts its wealth in coconuts, fish, fresh air, and foreign aid. The 10,000 or so people who scratch a living from Tuvalu's 10 square miles - nine atolls speckled across 400 miles of ocean north of Fiji - enjoy a yearly gross domestic product of US$10 million.
The cyber parcel the visitors were trying to talk Paeniu and his government into mining - the top-level domain .tv - will be marketed to television companies as an alternative to the ubiquitous but nondescript .com. Just how much will television moguls pay for a name like Fox.tv? The idea is presumed to be so rich that five parties from three continents showed up to make pitches. Three other outfits filed bids to help Tuvalu develop the domain. One high-profile company, Microsoft-owned WebTV, kept out of the bidding after a failed preemptive grab at the domain.
They came, they hung out by the lagoon, they drank cold beverages on a concrete patio. And when they were gone, Paeniu and a panel of experts chose finalists.
At Deal Central, the Vaiaku Lagi Hotel, most hands are held close to the vest.
On the Vaiaku Lagi's patio, Zentaro Ohashi shows off a prize: a big flounder he has just grabbed, barehanded, from the reef edging the lagoon. Hideto Kuribayashi, well-tanned heir to a century-old Japanese trading company, sits at a table nearby. He is rehearsing a talk he must give, in English, to Paeniu and the Tuvalu Top-Level Domain Task Force. The subject of his discourse, naturally, is how his company, Nanyo Boeki, will spin gold from .tv.
"We are very appreciated to having such a opportunity to present you our propose," Kuribayashi intones. Ohashi might help. He lives in the Bay Area, serving as vice president of a Web consulting firm called Netyear, and his English is fluent. But he is also Kuribayashi's rival, and neither man acknowledges the other.
Ohashi also encounters Joseph Kim, a UC Berkeley graduate who started his own company, Ipcom, to bid for .tv. By his own account, Kim's informal style has gotten him into trouble with Prime Minister Paeniu. "When I see him walking, I'll say, 'Hey, Prime Minister.' I think he's not used to that," Kim reflects.
Now Ohashi is on the receiving end of a pointed Kim query. "So what are you going to do about Rubin?" Kim asks, referring to a WebTV executive who at one point managed to get administrative control of .tv without the government in Tuvalu knowing about it. "We're just going to pretend he doesn't exist," Ohashi responds. Later, he admits he has no idea who Rubin is.
Both Ohashi and Kim are old .tv hands. In 1995, Ohashi faxed Funafuti, proposing to help the government market the domain. Until Ohashi's fax, life in Tuvalu went on untouched by the strange new realities created when the International Organization for Standardization's two-letter country codes were adopted as top-level domains for every nation in the world. Most of the ISO 3166 codes are straightforward and innocuous: .us for the United States, .de for Deutschland. With Network Solutions' exclusive contract with the US government to administer .com - and that generic domain's early popularity - several of the national domains suddenly looked like they had profit potential. For instance, in a world obsessed with trademark integrity, Turkmenistan's .tm looked like pay dirt.
James Conway, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was working as a consultant to Tuvalu's minister of finance when Ohashi's message came in. "Out of the fax came this note from a guy in New York proposing to help Tuvalu market .tv," he says. "I wasn't here so long that I hadn't heard about the Internet, but this one-page fax mentioned stuff like top-level domains and .tv. I was like, 'What is this person talking about?'"
What Ohashi was talking about was marketing .tv to broadcasters in the United States and Japan in return for a share of the take. All Tuvalu had to do was tell the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority that Ohashi had been appointed to handle .tv and he would begin setting up accounts. But as Conway recounts, "Nobody knew about .tv then, and we didn't follow it up."
Kim, in 1996 a Silicon Valley programmer, starred in the sequel. "I was scanning the list of ISO 3166 country codes, and I was like, 'Wow! TV!'" An online database, though, showed that IANA had given administrative authority for .tv to Andrew Rubin, manager of communications software for WebTV. But Kim noticed something he thought was strange: No .tv names were being sold. So he called Funafuti. "I got in touch with the finance secretary, and I said this guy Andrew Rubin is not maximizing your revenue. And he was like, 'Who is Andrew Rubin?'"
That's the question Paeniu asked, too, when, returning as prime minister in early 1997 after three-plus years leading the opposition, he followed up on some advice he had gotten during a fellowship at Australian National University: Make something out of .tv. He was shocked to learn an outsider held sway over the domain (a control IANA rescinded when Tuvalu appealed earlier this year). Soon, though, Paeniu was being courted. First, WebTV reportedly tried to settle its claim to .tv by offering the government $10,000 for every name registered to the domain. That offer was rejected, and others followed. Proposals rolled in from the US, Canada, Japan, England, Hong Kong, Switzerland, and Australia.
Realizing he was out of his depth in assessing the deals, Paeniu, who holds a master's degree in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Hawaii, asked the International Telecommunication Union to assign a consultant. The person who got the job was Antony Van Couvering, president of the US subsidiary of UK-based NetNames, a domain-registration firm. As marketer for two national domains with potential commercial value - Turkmenistan's .tm and American Samoa's .as (valued in Scandinavia as a parallel to the A.S. that denotes an incorporated entity) - the company had experience with the issues Tuvalu faced. Van Couvering's verdict, delivered last February: Scrap all pending proposals, some of which he judged real scams, and start over with a task force following a carefully laid-out bidding process. Paeniu went along with the advice, Van Couvering withdrew as consultant so his company could bid on .tv, and the domain strangers started visiting Tuvalu.
Paeniu approaches the promise of .tv riches warily. Past deals involving passports and phone numbers explain why.
A few years ago, Hong Kong's Asia Pacific Telecom rented Tuvalu's unused phone numbers, resold them to offshore customers, and shared the profit with the government. The sun shone brightly on the agreement at first. Clouds appeared, though, when it became known that some of the rented numbers were being used for phone-sex lines. In a country that styles itself devoutly Christian and sports a national anthem paying extended tribute to the Almighty, the news didn't sit well.
A second scheme, in which the government sells passports to Hong Kong citizens who might want to hold papers from a British Commonwealth country, has proceeded without moral taint. But neither has it produced much wealth.
"I've personally learned a very good lesson from that," says Paeniu. "When we first hit on the passport deal, my hopes were raised that we'd earn millions of dollars a year, but we're really not getting the cream we're supposed to get."
Although he doesn't mention it, Paeniu and his fellow islanders have another reason to take a guarded stance toward the promise of .tv wealth: So far, none of the entrepreneurial attempts to turn national domains into commercial riches has resulted in a big score. NetNames says that .tm registrations were temporarily halted because some customers set up sex sites, a practice displeasing to Turkmenistan's Muslim régime. On the other hand, .as is attracting more than 500 new accounts a month for $90, two-year registrations. BRS Media hit upon the idea of selling .fm - the domain of the Federated States of Micronesia - to FM stations. The haul, company president George Bundy says, is expected by year's end to be $150,000 from 750 stations who have paid $200 each for a two-year signup. Bill Semich, president of an outfit formed to market .nu for the tinier-than-Tuvalu South Pacific nation of Niue, says he has moved 15,000 names at $25 per year.
But these deals sound like chump change when you compare them with what is promised when .tv goes live: tens of millions of dollars - for starters. The Tuvalu domain may have special power, but Semich says his experience with .nu has taught him something about consumer preferences. "Users have come to think that the www and the .com are necessary in an Internet name," he says.
"Network Solutions essentially has a branding monopoly with .com - .com is like Coca-Cola and the others aren't even Royal Crown. They're like supermarket brands."
When the Tuvalu Top-Level Domain Task Force picked three finalists in July, Zentaro Ohashi's bid wasn't among them. Neither was Joseph Kim's. But NetNames, offering a revenue split that could bring $150 million to Tuvalu over the next decade, made the cut. So did another UK firm, Ixtel. The big buzz, though, surrounded Canada's Information.CA, which promised $50 million in advance for the contract.
"This seems like a gift from God," Paeniu says of the bids as the decision nears. He says if he has his way the cash will be used to establish a scholarship for study at universities overseas. He also says a chunk of the money might be used to upgrade transportation in and out of Tuvalu. And some of the windfall, Paeniu emphasizes, should go into a trust fund set up by foreign-aid donors to give Tuvalu stable future income.
The night before most of them depart Funafuti, the .tv hopefuls wash down sashimi with big cans of Foster's on the Vaiaku Lagi's patio. Paeniu is seated at the table where earlier Hideto Kuribayashi struggled with his rehearsal. Kuribayashi, who sits across from the prime minister, is subdued. The task force couldn't decipher parts of his oral presentation. No matter - he will get to provide a written explanation. The party, enlivened by the joking of Foreign Affairs Secretary Pokia Tihala, quiets as Paeniu launches into a parable.
"Some years ago, a boy no older than 14 was fishing out between the islands, and he lost his way at sea," Paeniu relates. "The boy lived for a week or so by catching fish and drinking the blood, but after some time he couldn't find anymore fish. Suddenly, a huge wave washed over the boy and flipped his canoe upside down. Eventually the seas calmed down and the boy was able to turn the canoe back upright. And when he pulled himself out of the water, weak and starving, the boy found to his surprise that his canoe was filled with fish. He lived for 45 days before being rescued, and returned to Tuvalu a very religious man."
Is .tv a canoe full of money?
The answer lies in how the television world answers an impatient aside Tihala utters as he sits at the Vaiaku Lagi's bar gazing at a commercial for CNN Interactive on the tube.
"CNN.com?" he shakes his head. "No, no. How about CNN.tv?"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew Raskin ([email protected]) is a freelance writer based in New York.
