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In 1995, Stephen Boland sat in his government office while working as the macroeconomic planner for the Pacific microstate of Tuvalu when the fax machine whirred to life. On its thermal paper, it printed a content that they are able to later amount to a winning lottery ticket. The content was a dispatch informing Tuvalu it had been assigned a country code top-level domain- the string of personas at the end of a URL, like. com or. org- for its Internet addresses. The domain for Tuvalu happened to be “. tv ,” the worldwide metonym for broadcast amusement. At the time, the ultimate meaning of the designation was not clear to Boland , nor the others in the office. They had a most pressing question.
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” We were all be standing looking at this fax ,” Boland said.” People were talking about’ dot Tv’ … and we’re going,’ what the hell is this Internet thing? ‘”
Nearly 25 years later, the Internet’s full power remains relatively unknown to many people on the island, but its evolution has attained Tuvalu’s. tv domain one of its more valuable assets. Thanks to the rise of livestreamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu deserves about 1/12 th of its annual gross national income( GNI) from licensing its land to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch through the Virginia-based company Verisign. And in 2021, when Tuvalu’s contract with Verisign expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher.
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Masters of a valuable domainLocated halfway between Hawaii and Australia, Tuvalu is a chain of coral atolls and reef islands with a population of about 11,000. Before gaining independence from the United kingdom government in 1978, Tuvalu was part of Britain’s Gilbert and Ellice Islands protectorate. Tuvalu’s capital island, Funafuti, is an 11 -mile crescent of coral encircling a 106 -square-mile lagoon. There is one airfield, one bank, one hospital and one road that spans the length of the atoll. No matter where one stands on the atoll, it’s possible to see across the entire island with ease.
Tuvalu’s fishing industry and limited agriculture does not yield enough food to support the population of the microstate, which subsists mainly on imported goods. Despite this imbalance in food production, the quality of life in Tuvalu is relatively high. Compulsory public education has brought the nation’s adult literacy rate up to virtually 99 percentage, and the World Bank classifies Tuvalu as an upper-middle-income economy, with its territory fishing rights accounting for the biggest clump of its GNI at an estimated $ 19 million( roughly Rs. 135.71 crores) in permission costs in 2018. But another sizeable component branches directly from its the licences of its. tv URL suffix, thanks to the recent surge in streaming locates. As locates utilising. tv develop in prominence, Tuvalu’s domain on the web may eventually supersede that of its seas.
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Few Tuvaluans are able to access the streaming services powered by. tv. The nation’s Internet, though widely accessible, is limited to a satellite communication with reduced streaming ability. However, with more than 140 million people around the world consuming content via Twitch.tv and other streaming platforms, the monetary benefits have helped Tuvalu in more tangible routes than recreation.( Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post .)
“[. tv] has provided a certain, sure income ,” said Seve Paeniu, Tuvalu’s Minister of Finance.” It enables the government to provide essential services to its people through providing schooling and education for the kids, providing medical services to our people, and also in terms of improving the basic economic infrastructure and service delivery to local communities .”
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To monetise. tv, both governments of Tuvalu has negotiated a series of agreements allowing foreign companies to market the top-level domain for commercial-grade employ. Under the current deal, signed in 2011, Virginia-based network infrastructure firm Verisign pays Tuvalu around$ 5 million( approximately Rs. 35.71 crores) per year for the right to administer. tv. For a nation whose annual domestic revenues tend to hover around $60 million( approximately Rs. 428.56 crores ), this is a substantial benefit.
The agreement with Verisign expires in 2021, opening the door for a renegotiation between Tuvalu and Verisign. With the realized importance of. tv buoyed by the success of Twitch.tv and other platforms- thanks to a sustained and substantial increase in esports and video game streaming- an updated agreement could be a bonanza for Tuvalu.
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The. tv land has been a useful asset for Verisign as well. As a registry, Verisign is essentially a wholesaler of domain names. It makes domain name expansions, situateds the rules for those domain names and accredits retailers- registrars such as GoDaddy or Dynadot- to sell domain name registrations directly to consumers. It’s difficult to calculate exactly how much Verisign profits from its command of. tv every year, but a look at some of the numbers involved supports an idea of the bigger picture.
Verisign has not made public the exact number of registered. tv URLs. DomainTools indices 500,700. tv areas, while Domain Name Stat determineds the amount at 470,102. Both of these figures are, at best, approximates based on a tally of visible locates rather than total registered domains.
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Verisign costs registrars an annual cost of $7.85 for each. com domain in its registry. “Premium” top-level domains such as. tv are more expensive; the exact fee for. tv is not publicly available, but registrars reported a 12 percent price increase in 2017. One lesson, seen in a document obtained by The Post, presented a website accused only over $100 a year for the continued registry and maintenance of its. tv address. Experts have estimated that the operating cost of Verisign’s registry is$ 1 per region per year.
One amount is not up for debate: In 2018, Verisign’s domain registry operation brought in a total of $1.21 billion in revenue, according to its investor’s report.
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” We are proud of our long-standing relationship with both governments of Tuvalu, and of the task we’ve done to help make-up. tv regions some of the world’s premier destinations for entertainment ,” said a Verisign representative. The corporation also dispenses other common lands such as. com,. net,. gov and. edu.
But the Tuvalu-Verisign relationship has not always been harmonious, which could specified the stage for Tuvalu to try to garner even more money for the domain licensing deal.
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In search of a new dealBefore the 2011 contract renegotiation between the two parties, former Minister of Finance Lotoala Metia described Verisign’s annual. tv pays- then$ two million per year- as “peanuts.”
Paeniu’s rhetoric is more diplomatic, but he shares his predecessor’s mind-set.” In the end, there have to be compromises, and therefore, at the time, we objective up with such an arrangement ,” said Paeniu of the 2011 discussions.” Currently, in my own vistum, that is not acceptable- we could have achieved a better bargain .”
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Boland shares that assessment.
” This is a really underutilised asset that Tuvalu could be making a lot more money out of, if it had had somebody on its back to really combat for it, some sort of IT-streaming expert that knew the ins and outs of what would be a good arrangement ,” Boland said.
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As the renegotiation approaches, Paeniu and his colleagues have maintained a careful watch on the perceived value of. tv as the numbers around streaming amusement have skyrocketed. According to Twitch Tracker, Twitch’s average concurrent viewership enhanced by 1,580 percent( 77,798 to 1,229, 122) between September 2012 and December 2019. In 2012, there are still 3,386 partnered canals on Twitch; now there are over 27,000. In words of broader streaming service amounts, Cisco predicted in 2017 that online video would account for 82 percentage of all web traffic by 2021, when the. tv renegotiation is scheduled to occur.
Should Tuvalu not get an offer it deems to be fair, “the two countries ” could choose to license the. tv region to one of Verisign’s contestants, like Neustar or Afilias.
” The current agreement has disadvantaged Tuvalu from capitalising on the advent of these online streaming services and the potential additional revenue that those services could offer with regard to the. tv agreement ,” said Paeniu.” Moving forward, it is indeed the intention of the Tuvalu government to renegotiate the agreement when it expires in about a year’s time .”
While hopeful for a successful renegotiation with Verisign, Paeniu said that Tuvalu will be open to exploring entreats from other companies to take over the management of. tv in 2021.” Our objective is to ensure that we maximise our is conducive to this .”
Another influx ahead? Though specific. tv usage amounts are unclear, the overall apply of country code top-level domains been increasing. According to Verisign’s August 2019 domain name industry brief, total registrations of these kinds of top-level domain have increased by 6 percentage time over year. The designation of. tv is not one of the 10 largest country code top-level domains, but it has risen by importance in recent years.
Leading the charge is Twitch.tv. In the battle for streaming supremacy, Twitch has tethered its hopes to the rapidly growing world of gaming and esports content. This strategy has paid off so far: with 9.36 billion hours viewed in 2018, Twitch has begun to match the viewership numbers of cable news networks such as Fox News and MSNBC.
Twitch is by far the most well-known. tv website, and the only one graded in Alexa’s top 50. But many of its challengers have registered. tv URLs of their own. DisneyPlus.tv redirects customers to Disney’s main website; the same starts for Netflix.tv, Hulu.tv, YouTube.tv and Amazon.tv. As long as Twitch remains in the spotlight,. tv isn’t going anywhere. And now the government of Tuvalu is wise to the stakes.
” I feel the battle[ for increased licensing costs] should have been started back in 2011 ,” said Boland.” Even at that point, it was quite clear what was going on with the development of the top-level domains, and broadcasting and streaming and all those sorts of things … all the expertise and the information, the knowledge, seemed to be residing with Verisign. Tuvalu really had very limited expertise, very limited understanding of the market involved. And so it’s a very asymmetric kind of negotiation that takes place .”
Regardless of their success in the future negotiations, Tuvalu’s citizens should soon be able to start Twitch channels of their own and participate in the streaming hysterium to which home countries has been financially tied. Thanks to a World Bank grant, projects are underway to install a submarine fibre optic cable in Tuvalu, drastically increasing the nation’s bandwidth and boosting Internet connectivity.
” At that time ,” said Paeniu,” perhaps our community and our people will be able to directly benefit from the online streaming services that. tv would be able to offer .”
( c) The Washington Post 2019
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