The internet has become a decisive factor in the economy of many countries, but some regions are reaping special benefits for a single reason: the two-letter identification they received as their geographic top-level domain (ccTLD). Extensions like .tv, .to and .tk have a notable presence among web domains, but which countries do they actually belong to?
The official address of Twitch is twitch.tv. One might think that because of the kind of content that platform broadcasts (and which you can download), the “.tv” is associated with “television,” but that’s not the case. The .tv works the same way as .es, .ar, .uy, .pe and other Web domains of geographic top-level. So that means that some region should be getting benefits from those two letters if a global streaming service uses them in its address. Which one?
The Pacific Islands That Earn Millions From Their Web Domains
Julian O'Shea explains on his YouTube channel that .tv belongs to Tuvalu, a country located roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Julian had the chance to travel to Tuvalu in 2014, and even ended up at a dinner with the prime minister, who explained that Tuvalu can only survive climate change (it sits just four meters above sea level) with money and technology. Its domain is part of that equation, and thanks to an agreement with VeriSign, Tuvalu receives five million dollars annually (with renegotiation on the horizon), nearly 10 percent of its domestic revenue.
Another case similar to Tuvalu is .fm, belonging to the Federated States of Micronesia, but then we have .to, assigned to Tonga. What makes .to special compared to the rest? It's one of only ten domains that allow the use of emojis. For example, Julian registered www.??️.to, an address that browsers interpret as punycode and that sends you to his YouTube channel.
Finally, we come to the .tk domain, under the wing of Tokelau, a country made up of three atolls and more than a hundred islets, with a total population of 1,500 inhabitants. Tokelau emerges as the largest country on the Web in terms of domains for one reason: the names are free, while payments are made when you renew the registration or to access an upgrade that enables full access to the domain. On one hand, the .tk domain represents 10 percent of the national economy, and on the other, its free nature made it a very popular option for scammers and phishing campaigns.
