Originally this blog post was supposed to be about the physical location of the services I use on a daily basis. But while researching the services I frequently use I came across a story that was much more interesting. A story not necessarily about physical location, but more broadly about the concept of domains. And how digital domains can sometimes intersect with real-world domains.
Twitch.tv
My initial research on Twitch.tv, an online live-streaming platform, showed that Twitch.tv, originally named Justin.tv, was founded by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt in 2007. Twitch.tv’s headquarters are located in San Francisco, while its parent company’s Amazon headquarters are found in Seattle, Washington.
To me, this information is frankly not that interesting. Another big tech company with its headquarters in San Francisco, big deal? No. It did not surprise me either that Twitch is currently owned by global superpower Amazon. What I did find interesting about the Twitch.tv case is not so much about their headquarters’ location, which to none of our surprise is in San Francisco; much more intriguing is the origin of their domain: .tv
Tuvalu
In 1995, as the Internet was getting more and more globalized, a non-profit organization known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN for short, was tasked with handing out ccTLDs to all the countries in the world. A ccTLD is a country-code top-level Level Domain. These are the suffixes at the end of web addresses that indicate to which country the web page is relevant; examples are: .nl or.uk for the Netherlands and the UK, respectively. Basically, every country got assigned their own two-letter code, which they own the licensing rights to. Most of these top-level level domains are pretty straight-forward and unremarkable, but others just turned out to be quite valuable.
And so in 1995 the macroeconomic planner got a fax one day informing him that the recently independent country of Tuvalu had been assigned their own ccTLD: “.tv“. At the time, the Tuvaluan government didn’t think much of this. In fact, their first question was: “What is ‘the internet’?”. Mind you this is the mid-90s, the Internet is only recently becoming a global phenomenon, and Tuvalu is a Pacific island nation with only 11.000 inhabitants.
Domains as resources
It is only after the internet became more widespread, Tuvalu got access to it as well, and the digital landscape really got its footing is when Tuvalu’s country-code really became valuable. The term “tv” is used globally as a signifier for broadcasting television and streaming platforms, and so the domain name “.tv” became highly sought after. The government of Tuvalu struck a deal in 2011 with network-infrastructure firm Verisign, allowing them to license out the “.tv” domain in exchange for $5 million a year to the country of Tuvalu. This is a significant chunk of money for a country whose Gross Domestic Product hovers around $60 million annually.
One of the companies that licensed the “.tv” domain through Verisign is Twitch.tv, one of the biggest websites to use the Tuvaluan domain name not for their affiliation with Tuvalu, but simply for the gimmick of having “tv” in their domain name. Thus Twitch and its popularity became indirectly responsible for a significant chunk of a country’s GDP.
Tuvalu’s deal with Verisign expired in 2021, and they have reportedly signed a new deal with the company GoDaddy who are now the ones licensing the “.tv” domain to Twitch. Exact figures have not been made public as to the financials of this new deal, but with the ever-growing rise of Twitch.tv and online live-streaming it is safe to assume it is significantly more than their previous deal of $5 million annually. Experts estimate that the new deal with GoDaddy can bring in as much as $10 million annually to the country of Tuvalu, which would account for about one-SIXTH of its GDP.
This is an interesting case study because it shows us that the digital world overlaps with our physical world in more ways than one, and the digital world can have a significant impact on oft-forgotten places in our real, physical world.
Super interesting post! I had never even thought about the economy behind the .com’s, .nl’s .tv’s etcetera of the world. Somehow it is actually surprising to me that real life countries are actually kind of in charge of their own domains. For some reason I thought these things just worked themselves out in a wild-west type of way.
Very interesting topic! I knew there was some connection between Tuvalu and the .tv domain, but was unaware of the details, so thanks for providing us with the whole story.
Although one might ask why this licensing practice is allowed at all, I’m glad for Tuvalu that .tv generates significant revenue (probably very much needed considering the extremely vulnerable position of the country due to climate change). With this in mind and given the popularity of the domain, $5 (or $10) million doesn’t even seem that much…