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"TV" TLD Sells For $50 Million
Several readers wrote to us regarding
the sale of the ".tv" domain to DotTV by the nation of the Tuvalu. Yeah -- for a cool $50 million, the company has secured the the rights to the domain name, and claims it will make money selling domain names within that TLD.
GIPLU maps arbitrary strings to IP numbers and automatically self-organizes into a distributed cached hierarchical database based on UTF-8 collation. It is intended primarily as a way for people and businesses to use the names they already have legal right to use IRL, such as their own name/address and dba etc.
Secondarily, local caches can look up dynamic IPs, so we can get over that nonsense and move on to get authentication right.
The legacy TLD structure will tend to get subsumed (in reversed order), while the useful new TLD "gts" will instantly give all global telephone system users a distinct useable name, e.g., 1212.555.206.us.gts would be Seattle information. The use of telephone numbers as domain names in this fashion is obvious and public domain (not patentable). It will become significant for broadband VOIP.
Of course, GIPLU and .gts only existed in my mind (and wherever else it may independently have sprouted) until just now, when it got into yours. We'll see what happens next :)
Try http://www.help.me :-)
Ack! Don't even think that. There are enough screwballs in this little rectangular state as it is.
And do you really think the DNS servers for .tv will be placed in Tuvalu, and not close to MAE East or West or at least D-GIX or another large interconnection point? (hint, they're currently in the US).
The people who bought the rights to .tv have no reason to care about Tuvalu other than as much as any business care about their business partners.
You'd be upset if your country just received 50 million people? I think there is only like 10,000 people in the country, so that means 50,000 a piece. The country was granted the TLD, and they should be able to do whatever they want with it.
The problem here is that most of these domains they advertise are uniq company names. There's an argument that abc.tv is just the first three letters of the alphabet, common use. But things like msn.tv, cnet.tv, or nbc.tv? We know Coca-Cola's feelings on the issue, so I don't expect coke.tv to survive any bidding. :)
Perhaps they just hope some mope will buy a domain, and then let Coke sue them and not dotTV. A lot of these "auctions" end this week. If they actually have serious bidders behind the numbers, they could recover plenty of that $50 million.
The relevant RFC's have been ignored since big businesses started getting on the net and Network Solutions started whoring domains like they were property on the beach. Why do you think their motto is to make sure to register the .net and .org domains along with that shiny new .com you're registering? If there was such a thing as a scheme, it is long since been thrown away. There are tons of third world countries that would rather sell their stupid 2 letter TLD for millions of dollars than have their people starving in huts without running water OR electricity, much less Internet access!
IMHO if a country wants to waive their right to their TLD, fine, you can. If you try to sell it then it should instantly fall back to ownership by a non-profit organization or removed from the DNS heirarchy completely. Countries were assigned a TLD for the purpose of organizing their Internet companies within that domain, NOT to go off and sell it to some shady company. There should've been a clause on the whole thing that country TLD's must be owned and operated by the governments or a representative of the government to which it applies in the best Interests of establishing a country-level TLD heirarchy. No, I'm not a lawyer and I don't speak their jargon. I'm sure there is a way to word it though that stops these stupid sales from happening like .cx, and .nu. It destroys the cultural identity of a sovereign nation when they just go off like that and throw their domain away. If you don't want your domain, fine, we will delete it from DNS so no one will abuse it.
You're just plain wrong. Did we need http2:// when cookies were introduced? Persistent connections? Did we need ftp2:// when on-the-fly-tar was introduced? It would take all of ten seconds and ten braincells to design a streaming TV protocol that would be sufficiently extensible. And to think that your reasoning behind this is increased bandwidth?? Oof.
i wrote my comment based not just on this article but also based on older one concerning creation of new TLD.
this one buy of one TLD is one illustration of general trend in todays buseness: ignore anything. care only for bigger profits.
(why i consider this buy be BAD? well, this and other country TLDs are supposed to be COUNTRY TLDs. that's why.)
hany
I agree, their starting prices are nuts. I got frantic.org for $18/year. What do they want for frantic.tv? Starting bid is $1,000. Now, I can understand the high starting bids for more popular names like nbc.tv etc. (even though whoever buys a name like that is going to face some serious lawsuit trouble), but starting EVERY bid at $1,000 is nuts. I guess it's the only way they figured they'd recoup their $50 million investment :)
-mike kania
URN's have apparently bitten the dust and as far as I know there is no decent implementation of a URN resolver.
For the past couple of years I have worked on something called the Handle System that is a distributed, (mostly) non-centralized name system. Check it out, it might be what you want. The Handle System is a flexible, distributed, and *secure* (unlike DNS) name system for digital objects and wasn't really intended to replace DNS, but it conceivably could. I have written a name server that responds to BIND requests for a DNS name by looking up the name as a handle and then returning the results in a BIND response. It works well and allows administrators to update/create/delete names using the distributed, secure handle protocol.
The Handle System was designed to have more of a flat, non-hierarchical namespace than DNS. We are releasing the next version of the system (5.0) on Monday.
The image appears gone now (and the directory is no longer browsable). I think you hit a nerve.
"*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20"
Not even if you're using it as a server?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
foo.com.us
"Commas, whadda ya mean we gotta put commas in our address?"
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Your comment only got a +1 because you checked the box that said "No Score +1 Bonus".
What, you didn't? There wasn't any such box?
Well, that's because your karma isn't high enough to rate that extra point, and since the other post only said "(Score:2)", instead of something like "(Score:2, Interesting)", which your original comment got, most likely anatoli's karma is high enough for the extra point and he/she didn't choose to disable it before posting.
If you'll read the Slashdot FAQ and Moderator Guidlines, this will all be clearer.
Judging by your user info, the moderators have been kind to you for the most part, and you may be on your way to a high enough karma to get that "bonus" point.
Should you get it, I don't recommend using it, as there are some very unkind moderators out there whose attention you don't need to attract if low scores on your comments upset you.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Actually it's down to the fact that the .us domain is allocated at a state level rather than a more logical usage basis.
.ca.us
So a site in California would be
Oh, and seeing as the British invented packet switched networks I guess you're wrong on the other point as well...
S.
Actually the UK was running a national X.25 network for many years before switching to IP. The coloured books that formed the basis of JANET and its commercial equivalents were technically far superior to the IP stacks of the time...
S.
Thanks for the support, icebalm. Looks like they got you, too. I've just about given up on /.
/peter
If I'm a guest in your name space, can I have my registration fee back, please?
/peter
they didn't buy it out - it's short for the name of their country
stay frosty and alert
i thought that was tonga (.to)
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
But how the hell do you spend it on an island in the middle of nowhere where everything is going to hell because of overpopulation and industrialization and everyone else is equally "rich"?
Tim
Yeah, but this certainly widens the gap between the technological haves and havenots, a distinction that is already becoming very very important, and in the next few years will be *the* determining factor separating the rich from the poor.
.tv. There is no reason I can imagine why they would care that their domain names don't end in .tv.
HOW does it widen the gap?
The people of Tuvalu are technological have-nots. With the money they gain they can buy a little technology if that's what they want, not going to change the world but definitely not a widening of the gap, agreed?
The people of Tuvalu have lost NO technology in this deal. They are just as capable (or more commonly incapable) of accessing the internet as they were before. They are just as capable of getting domain names as they were before. Their domain names, assuming they want a cost effective solution, won't end in
This does contribute to the increasing messiness of domain names, but it does not represent any sort of loss to the people of Tuvalu or any widening of the technological gap; how could it?
I dunno. If I were from Tuvalu, I think I'd be annoyed right now...
.tv , .net, .uk, .us or anything else?
But why? Even ignoring the influx of money, and assuming that you were actually from Tuvalu and had internet access, why would you care whether your domain name ended in
Unfortunately, at the same time as messing up the supposed tld structure even further, this sort of thing creates commercial interests to fight against any attempt to fix the mess in the future.
If the domains are on an auction system, what is the point? Say I can fork up the money to buy ABC.TV or NBC.TV, etc.. hoping to sell it at HUGE profit to the companies. Wouldn't they just sue for trademark infringement and domain squatting and take it from me? Other than that, I can't find any reason why someone would want to buy a .TV TLD, unless they plan on squatting.
This was not a troll, dumbass moderators. Same moderators who moderate up Jon Katz flames.
-- iCEBaLM
I found this... rather interesting.
:)
:)
:)
major networks - draw your own conclusions.
abc.tv $1M
cbs.tv $500K
nbc.tv $250K
fox.tv $250K
upn.tv $250K
wb.tv $10K (insert your own joke here
pbs.tv $500K (isn't this a *little* evil?)
and then there's cable (and some other stuff)...
$1M: cnn.tv, epsn.tv, web.tv
$500K: mtv.tv, nick.tv, tvguide.tv
$250K: vh1.tv, usa.tv, scifi.tv, comedycentral.tv, guide.tv, bbc.tv
$5000: tnn.tv, tbs.tv, tnt.tv
and... cspan.tv is not available? huh?
--- this comment is presented in WIDE SCREEN STEREO!!!
The are starting at $1000 a domain. So they need 50000 little ones and the more expensive domains will be their profit.
You're just plain wrong.
I realized that 10 seconds after I posted it... I've been up too long, really should go to sleep, but can't stop typing...
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
IIRC, the path the IETF is following infers that the tv:// protocol is more likely to be important for broadband delivery, similarly phone:// and fax:// will count more than the TLD does.
But as technology advances and more bandwidth becomes available protocols will change... once the tv:// protocol is created it must never change. Then we'll get into a mess with hbtv:// (High Bandwidth TV.), etc. *.tv will always mean (related to) multimedia entertainment.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
When broadband becomes ubiquitious and television production becomes smarter and more interactive, multimedia content over the internet will become huge.
.tv for a lousy 50 million, I give those people the suckers of the year award.
For giving up
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
No one said they would abandon their *.com's in favor of *.tv's. But it's not that difficult to see that people (at least english speakers) would see that .tv just might have something to do with television. The example I provided was to show that promoting the new domain name wouldn't be that difficult or expensive.
*.com's are ubiquitous, but so are tv's. T.V. is everywhere and is so ingrained in our culture that I think this is a brilliant move by this company.
T.V. is bigger than Jesus Christ. Respect it or fade away.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
the British invented packet switched networks
Yep, and they also invented T.V. 6 foot wide spinning disks with a spiral pattern of holes in it.
You may have invented both T.V. and packet switched networks but what did you do with them? We implemented picture scanning with electronics and, and then we built tcp-udp/ip on top of packet switching and started the inet. Admit it.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
I want to make it clear that I'm not with this guy... I love the peoples of the world. Even the Brits. But I don't want the achievements of my country being slighted. And if the fortunes of those achievements means that U.S. domains don't have to have a country code placed after them I think that's only fair.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
You need to find the contrast knob and turn it down some, the world isn't that black-and-white.
We inherited the Vietnam situation from France through (I'm pretty sure) treaty obligations. A very large segment of our population was totally against it, but an even larger percentage thought we were doing the right thing.
Cambodia... it's not like we were bombing cities, we were after supply routes. Sure it was wrong, but when serious wars are fought these things happen. I'm sure the people responsible for it thought that they were doing the right thing.
I don't know that much about Pol Pot, the first I heard of him he wasn't well liked here in the U.S.
China... we are trying to establish good relations, both economic and political, in order to have better influence over their human rights situation. China is the 400 pound gorilla that we really can't push around so we have to try to 'manage' it.
Every time the intelligence community was caught doing something inappropriate the people responsible (that we could identify) were brought forth and punished... as well as we could manage considering the circumstances. Sure, some things slipped through, that's because the U.S. is made up of falliblemen, not gods.
And I guess we stayed home during the Gulf War... we didn't commit the largest force or spend the most money... Hey, guess what? We did.
If you don't want to give the U.S. credit for the good that it does in international affairs then there's nothing I can do but try to make sure others hear another side of the story.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
Why don't you stop using the web, since you're so happy about the US contributions.
WTF are you talking about? I was reacting to this kind of sh*t:
The sheer arogance of the USA when it comes to all things technology is astounding. It's bad enough that the world has to put up with McDonalds, Coke, and Microsoft. Why should US Cultural Imperialism dominate the net as well??
Both this post and yours imply that americans think that they have a greater right to the inet than the rest of the peoples of the world... I don't think that. I've merely been defending the achievements of my country WRT the invention and early expansion of the inet. Surely you can acknowledge that.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
It's not a Tuvalu matter anymore. The TLD was sold, lock, stock, and key to a Canadian company. Any disputes now fall under Canadian law.
U.S. company, actually. And DotTV is giving all of these companies ample oppourtunity to protect their trademarks and if a company doesn't protect it's trademark it loses it... or so I've heard.
But, IANAL.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
Doesn't this like completely break the scheme for TLDs as being three letters for groups of some kind (amorphous but understandable -- com gov mil net org) and two letters for countries? I guess it was a bit up in the air, and maybe I don't really know the spec on it (RFC anyone?), but this just seems.... I dunno. If I were from Tuvalu, I think I'd be annoyed right now...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
Well... Since this is the Tuvalian domain, it would seem to be be Tuvalian copyright law that had to settle this, not US law.
Yeah, yeah, They could.
But in this kind of countries, the money usually end up in the hands of the ruling elite. That is, after all, why they are poor in the first place.
Not that I know squat about Tuvalu specifically.
Auckland: Tuvalu, the world's smallest economy, is on track to become among the richest per capita nations thanks to its Internet domain name, dot TV, Communications Minister Sam Teo said today.
.tv instead of the ubiquitous '.com.' Tuvalu owns 20 percent of DotTV.
.tv names will sell for several thousand dollars apiece, but some could go much higher.
.tv,' he told the newspaper.
In a country of just 10,600 people with gross national product per capita of $US400 ($A670), Tuvalu is now guaranteed $US50 million ($A84 million) through the sale of its Internet name to a US firm.
It is already receiving $US1 million ($A1.7 million) a quarter from its windfall.
Once Tuvalu receives the $US50 million, at current rates in 12 years, a new deal will be negotiated, the minister said.
Teo said the country had already banked $US15.5 million ($A26 million) in the past nine months, firmly ending speculation that the Polynesian nation was being conned.
Its annual budget seldom reaches $US14 million ($A23.5 million) and one of its biggest export earners pulls in about $US1.2 million ($A2 million) a year from renting out telephone numbers to sex-line operators.
Teo said the tiny state had so far received three quarterly payments, as well as a one-off payment of $US12.5 million ($A21 million) through a call option.
'It is working according to expectations,' Teo said in an interview from Funafuti.
Teo said it was 'not too bad' for a country like Tuvalu.
'We really need the money. We have a lot of things we want to do. We want to build a decent hospital, a decent wharf.
'We've been using gravel roads all this time. It's going to cost us $US4 or 5 million ($A6.7-8.4 million) to do up the roads. It's money that is going to be well spent.
'All the outer islands have no electricity, there is only one island that has electricity and it is this one.'
The badly needed income has not come without some sweat and tears over the '.tv' suffix.
Two years ago Tuvalu licensed Toronto-based company Information.ca.Corp. to handle the name. The Canadian company's head, Jason Chapnik, promised between $US60 million ($A100 million) and $US100 million ($A168 million) a year.
He failed to make the payments and a new deal was negotiated with Idealab, a Pasadena Internet business incubator responsible for online retailer EToys.
In the rearrangement Chapnik sold half his equity, producing the $US12.5 million ($A21 million) extra payment for Tuvalu, and joined the new board.
Idealab's new start-up, called DotTV, sells electronic mail and web addresses ending in
The company told the Los Angeles Times that most of its
A Tuvalu member of parliament, Koloa Talake, represents the country on the board.
'We were very, very, very poor, but now we are getting some money from the marketing of assets like
'We are very lucky to strike such a deal. We will be able to build things we would otherwise not be able to build. I know there are some countries here in the South Pacific that are very jealous.'
DotTV chief executive Lou Kerner told the LA Times he was confident he can succeed.
'It's the most recognisable two-letter symbol on the planet,' Kerner said. 'When you marry 'dot' with 'TV,' you become something very meaningful (on) the Internet.'
Recently hailed by the US State Department for being 'egalitarian, democratic and respectful of human rights,' Tuvalu has a troubled future.
Global warming will lead to the rising ocean swamping its nine atolls, none of which are more than seven metres above sea-level.
Just like how we all now have to specify http1.1://www.slashdot.org to make sure we get the benifit of persistant connections and pipelined requests...
And in exactly the same way that quicktime is totally unable to account for new advances in video decompression by having plugable codec modules.
Get real, the IETF is not going to specify a protocol as tv:// that is not extensable.
That's not the point is it? Those co-called "inventors" were strangly narrow-minded to begin with.
and never mind that the real huge boost came out of CERN.
Burgatronics
Do Not Read Burgatronics... It's Evil
"We must not, my friend, be the bubbles of our own liberal sentiments"
--John Adams in a letter to Thomas Jefferson
It is more efficient to search from a small base to a larger base...
.uk tld). Some hypothetical figures:
.com TLD for the country (which would have to be located on a centralised DNS server, otherwise how would you know which on to search), or you have 128 different DNS servers and you know which on you want. The latter option also has the advantage of redusing load on the servers, as the single centralised server (granted, it could be a farm with load balancing, but the problem is still there) would have to deal with every single DNS request.
For example, if you wanted to find shop.uk.com, you are searching a very large dataset, where as shop.co.uk is much smaller (it would only encompass the
Let's assume there are 128 countries (remember, we're being hypothetical)
You have 2 choices. You search the
- Damnit, I'm dead Jim
Whoah.. that program looks _cool_ what prog is that?
What top level domains are supposed to mean
changed when the internet became less an
educational/military resource and more a
corporate instrument.
Similarly, the term hacker lost any definition
that might have existed before computer crime
became a fashionable news story.
Things change. Deal with it.
Is it just me, or did the article make a mistake by saying that someone could register "law&order.tv" ? IIRC, '&' is a special character and cannot be used in a domain name.
If I happen to be right, it would partially confirm my suspicion that approximately 99% of people who post replies to Slashdot stories don't actually READ them.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
Anybody care to tell me why we have gmcanada.com when http://gm.ca would make much more sense?
Actually, one reason why you can't have gm.ca is that the current rules for .CA stipulates that the 2 character SLD are reserved for provinces and and territories. Albeit, the chance of us acquiring (or dividing) a GM territory is low, we have done it recently with the creation of Nunavut: nu.ca.
Still, I don't understand things like nissancanada.com when nissan.ca is perfectly OK
Well, the UK still doesn't bother to put their country's name on their postage stamps. I guess that's the snail-mail equivalent, right?
No, it's not governed by the British. It used to be, now it is self governing and just happens to have the Queen as head of state (like Canada or Oz).
"What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death."
5K/yr warez.tv
Auction Ends: 5 days after you submit this bid
well the consensus is that within 50 years Tuvalu will have been completely engulfed by rising sea levels, so maybe not.
I'm don't expect anyone to sue Tuvalu, all they've done is sell the .tv tld, which they have every right to do.
I expect that DotTV will be sued. They're not a sovereign nation; they're part of Idealab, which is located in California.
And I don't personally care to stop DotTV; they're not trying to squeeze $1MM/yr out of me. I do find them annoying, so I won't shed any tears when they do get sued.
If I have read the article correctly, DotTV have paid $50M for the rights for 10 years, this means the the Tuvaluese (?) are prepared to let DotTV pay for all the marketing, sell all the domain names, put all the public awareness work in, and then can sell th .TV TLD to whomsoever they want once the profile has been raised.
I've applied a progressive set of filters while browsing my White Pages (Minneapolis, MN):
Last: Johnson (28 pages)
First: Thomas (~80)
MI: E (~12)
Bear with me on this very crude sampling method, but generously saying the book serves 2 million people (probably ~1.5M), it can be said that there are over 1500 Thomas E. Johnsons in the United States alone.
With a system similar to RFC 2141, how would one find the Thomas E. Johnson that you are looking for? Do you enter "Thomas E. Johnson in Bloomington", "Tom Johnson on the 14th floor of that building by the building that says Gold Medal Flour" or what? There is never enough namespace...
--
--
E2 IN2 IE?
we in the USA invented the internet so we dont have to identify ourselves. other countrys do.
besides its really not that big of a deal. if you are that upset about it you must have some sort of superiority complex or something
I have to try to get .sex. Imagin how much money you could gain by selling .sex domains to the porn industry *g.
*smile*
Yea, instead of a french I Love Lucy or 3's Company they get the American version.
But, wasn't the MTV thing where incompatible people are stuck together ripped off from the Swedes?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Well, if your going to take that attitude: It's about time we point out that the net was tiny before the invention of the web (in the UK) and how about you refund us all those IPO billions that would never have existed if it were not for the web.
The chart is no longer accessable - any one have it saved?
Well, the industry certainly does have the money to spend, and they continually are making new shows, and they would love all of them to have an easily remembered URL. Given the lack of .coms still available, there's no way every show can have a .com, or at least without spending loads more money. For example, if ABC wanted to give Who Wants To Be A Millionaire something like millionaire.com (easy to remember), they'd have to buy it away from someone who already has been using the URL for a few years (see http://205.177.25.9/cgi-bin/whois??millionaire.com ) and would most likely try to get a buttload of money out of ABC (heck, I know I would). However, if they have a new naming scheme they can give numerous shows this easier to remember domain. I suppose it's a tradeoff between spending lots of money on every single URL to get a .com, giving really long, difficult URLs to shows, or trying .tv and seeing how it works. I'm sure they'd rather spend marketing cash than continually spending money buying away .coms.
That reminds me of a quotation. Hope I have it correct...
Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.Clive Barnes
I'll help on this one - perhaps implement it in Mozilla as an option? Already IE uses the search tool in the address box - something like this for this?
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
This is obscene - go to www.tv, and type in random gibberish in the box, and hit 'go'. They want $1000 per year for awweajthlkweajtlkj.tv! Dear lord!
"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
Visit
Sorry, it looks like they're not that dumb.
From their policies page, emphasis mine:
TERMINATION
dotTV Email Services may be terminated in whole or in part, effective immediately, by either dotTV or User at any time upon written notice, except as provided herein. Upon termination, User's right to use the dotTV Email Service immediately ceases, and dotTV is not obligated to forward any unread or unsent messages to User or any third party. dotTV shall not be liable to User or any third party for termination of the dotTV Email Service. In the case of a terminated paid dotTV Email Service ("Paid Service"), upon written request to dotTV, User shall receive at dotTV's option, either i) reimbursement of the pro-rata portion of the amount paid for the period remaining on User's account for the terminated Paid Service; or ii) credit for another Paid Service equivalent to the pro-rata portion of the amount paid for the period remaining on User's account for the terminated Paid Service. There shall be no reimbursement or credit if the dotTV Email Service is terminated due to User's violation of the terms of this Agreement. dotTV reserves the right to terminate User's e-mail address in the event that dotTV's rights to use certain domain names or e-mail addresses terminate or expire, in which case User shall receive a replacement dotTV e-mail address. In addition, dotTV retains the right, at dotTV's sole discretion, to terminate any and all parts of the dotTV Email Service provided to User, without refunding User for any annual fees paid but not yet accrued, if it determines that User has failed to comply with any of the terms of the Acceptable Use Policy. If DotTV determines that User has failed to comply with any of the terms in Section (a) above, of the Acceptable Use Policy, dotTV shall when appropriate, (1) facilitate criminal prosecution against such User by referring User's spamming activity to the appropriate legal authorities, and (2) bring a civil action against such User, who shall be liable to dotTV for any direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages incurred by dotTV as a result of User's spamming or other prohibited activity.
So, it looks like when they sell a domain corresponding to one of your e-mail addresses, you'll either be refunded your $1 on a pro-rated basis (snicker, snicker), or given a new e-mail address to last until the old one expires.
On the plus side, it seems like they take a hard-line stance against spamming.
US$10M, do the math, the US$1million basic yearly amount will either half the taxation of it?s citizens or allow some serious infrastructure improvement.
That's $1 million quarterly, not yearly. Actually, I suspect it's really $1.25 million quarterly, since otherwise it doesn't total to $50 million over 10 years. That's HALF their current GDP.
It was supposed to be funny, not serious.
My original comment was serious, why does it get only a 1?
Moderators, read it again and JUDGE FOR YOURSELF!
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I can see .tv locals, 3 years ahead, when
Internet revolution will finally reach them,
paying big bucks to register name under thier
own country domain to some foreing corporation.
Would anyone mind if I sold the .org TLD?
--
I like to watch.
Domain Name: coke.tv
Current Bid: $4,000 / Year
Next Minimum Bid: $4,100 / Year
That does say Year right? I was reading the agreement and stuff and they have to do the 2 years thing so really they are bidding $4000 a year, correct? I didn't read otherwise.
Hopefully if many of them bid on these domains without checking first, so let them take a extra hit in the wallet.
... your site has to be under the "laws of any jurisdiction where the domain name is accessible." ...
.tv domain?
.tv domain would have to be pulled. ;)
/. moderators, the above comment is easy to find), and it's gone 404. Can anyone describe what it was?
Hmm, sounds like www.tv violates US trademark law with their crazy pricing schemes for popular (and corporate) domains. Maybe dotTV can't even have their own
Maybe we can pay Togo (or some other small nation that'll bend over backwards for money) to outlaw sites that have a tv extention. That way, under dotTV's policies, every single
Oh yeah, they apparently found out about the pricing.gif (thanks to
Some points worth talking about have been raised in this thread though...
The .us domain policy does need to be changed to reflect the fact that the internet is becoming less and less dominated by the US. The fact that companies using .us have to use unrememberable org.locality.state.us domains completely discourages companies from using the .us domain. At the present time, US companies basically don't have any choice but to get a .com domain - even if they sell exclusively to residents of, say, Pigsqueal, Arkansas. I know other countries have made this point in the ICANN discussions.
Secondly, the 'internet' was certainly not the only network around - there were others, like janet & starnet. It won because:
- It had a head start
- It was based in a country with a huge population
Same reason why only the US desktop computer companies (PC & Mac) won - there used to be dozens - from many different countries.Thirdly, someone said that the rest of the world should be paying the US back for inventing and building the net. I will ignore for the moment the fact that the technologies that drive the net today were not all invented in the States, in order to point out that we are paying you back:
"I'll be impressed with access to the internet in non-US countries when you sufficiently deregulate your phone companies and get flat-rate local phone service. You're twenty years behind the US. "
Name:2000 World Times Information Society Index, ISI
Source: IDC/World Times
1. Sweden 5.06
2. USA. 5.04
3. Finland 4.58
4. Norway 4.48
4. Denmark 4.34
The index is based on 23 variables, amongst others computerinfrastructur, socialinfrastructur, internet and educational level....
You're at second place, not first....
Oh come on! We all know from surfing newgroup pr0n that TV means transvestite! I'm waiting for the MarthaStewart.tv domain to pop up. Then all those rumors will be confirmed.
==
"This is the nineties. You don't just go around punching people. You have to say something cool first."
but people in England know they can go to www.amazon.co.uk and get prices in their currency.
Clued up people in Britain also know that they can go to amazon.com and get cheaper books and faster delivery.
No, it doesn't make sense to me either
Tuvulu's claim to fame is a maximum height above sea level of something like 5 metres. .tv domain still valid?
If Global Warming is a reality, these guys are the first to go.
If this happens, is the
.. that I may go for gov.tv domain ;-)
just imagine giving someone a business card with email president@gov.tv
;-)
It is being done by the government. Specifically, by the soverign Tuvaluan government. If by "the government" you meant the government of the United States of America, I don't think they really have jurisdiction there. To the extent that ".tv" is the Tuvulans' to do with as they please, they are certainly empowered to subcontract or subdelegate to DotTV if they see fit. Tuvaluan citizens who object can express their displeasure at the ballot box.
Somebody did look into it. Namely, the Tuvaluan Minister of Information Technology (or whatever the appropriate title might be) looked into it. Who else needs to look into this action taken by a soverign government? ICANN? Country names are delegated to the named countries; I doubt that DNS delegation policy would call for ICANN to take any action.
Or would it? Is ".tv" really and truly the Tuvaluans' to do with as they please? Does ICANN treat delegated domain management completely hands-off? Or does ICANN have policies and procedures regarding what nations may do with their two-letter contry domains?
That's not a rhetorical question. I just don't know the answer. Anybody? What rules, if any, do all nations have to obey with respect to their corresponding two-letter TLD's?
Too right. They are soooo going to get their butts sued. This little scam is going to cost them a lot more than 50M
--
They could have gotten around this by making all initial bids uniform and reasonable ($200 range), then adding an extended time limit of, say, 120 days. Advertise the heck out DotTV to attract eyeballs, and let the bidders determine the market.
... but they were greedy.
By determining the market themselves, particularly with respect to trademarked names, DotTV has opened themselves up to lawsuits which will crush them.
They could have
---
To avoid the market being flooded they need only limit the total number of auctions running at any one time to a finite number. Start with around 700 and then increase as activity warrants. Decrease available spaces too, if necessary.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
Well that's what I was saying. You can't just make up a new TLD and expect it to go anywhere. Likewise, you can't (easily) setup a new dns system. You could do it but it's not backward compatible. Now part of the point is that it wouldn't be backward compatible (so that we can ditch all the problems with the old system) but it's not likely to be an easy sell. Primarily, because you can't really give out your url and reliably expect people to be able to find your page. You'd have to tell people "go to foo.bar, oh wait, are you using newdns?" And while that's all good and well for the bunch of us that know how to configure BIND and run your own local DNS server (ie, local to your autonomous system, one in which you have control over) it doesn't work too well for joe-blow end-user who doesn't have a clue what DNS even is.
.com) to the appopriate server, and new TLDs to your own servers. This gets the backward compatibility working and all that's required is to dl a new root servers config file. However, the big problem is still one of adoption. If no one goes to it then you can't really expect people to get to your url unless their DNS server is using the new root servers file.
.com or .org simply because of recognition issues). Country codes should also have been required from the start (even for the US!). If everything was broken done by country and then by category (.com, .net, etc) then things would be a lot better off. There's also the .int domain for international stuff. Imagine how much better this would all be! If I went to www.microsoft.com.int I should be presented with choice of country (and also info about the company itself) say. Then I might want the Canadian stuff, so that would take me to www.microsoft.com.ca, it makes perfect sense, but because it wasn't thought of originally (and certainly never really adhered to), it doesn't work, and we can't really turn back time and remake it.
Now if you simply wanted to add new TLDs and get around the endless process that the current system has ("there'll be some new TLDs real soon now, no really!") then I suppose you could setup a set of root (., dot domain) servers which would direct requests to old TLDs (like
Generally speaking, it's not a good idea to create a dueling standard, especially is the previous one is well entrenched. Also, there really needs to be a tangible improvement. Just telling people "yeah well the current system is all messed up so we decided to do our own" doesn't really work all that well. I agree that the system is messed up. It would be really nice if we could come up with a set of TLDs that are strictly comercial, and a set that are strictly non-comercial. If it were properly regulated, then a company could take the comercial ones, but they wouldn't be allowed to use the company name (or trademarks) in the non-comercial namespace. Trademark law would still apply to obvious rip-off domains (like microsoft.) but something like coke or ibm (if used as a legit abreviation or acronym) should be allowed. The real problem isn't the DNS system, it's the TLD system that the DNS system uses. Unfortunately, it seems that it's largely being driven by comercial interests. If non-comercial interests could get some decent representation then things could be improved (but it's hard to undo a lot of the damage). I mean let's look at the original system:
.com should be for comercial, period.
.org should be for organizations (only non-profit even?), period.
.net doesn't really make a lot of sense but should be reserved for networking type things (say ISPs, hosting services, etc), period.
Network Solutions really shouldn't be encouraging people to expand their net presence by registering all 3. What's really missing from all of this though is a TLD for personal sites. It obviously wasn't a consideration when this was all created but now it's really a large gap (I plan to register a domain I'll probably go for
Nodens
Yeah, but don't you get into trouble because of the fact that all the TLDs are really sub-domains of the . (dot) domain? While it would be possible to create new TLDs, it wouldn't work because when you go to do a DNS lookup you start at the . and then go to .com. then foobar.com. So you'd be able to add a TLD in your Bind config but you aren't going to get anywhere from it (unless you just get everyone to use your server as their DNS server but then you're looking at lots of overhead).
Nodens
Umm no. You could actually make a stronger case for the soviets winning WWWII than you can for the states.
So you mean that the people of Nicaragua are happy that THEIR revolutionary movement (the Sandinistas) were able to overcome the US-backed Dictatorship and the US-backed counter-revolutionary (Contra, remember the Iran-Contra scandal?) forces?
You're right, they are happier, but no thanks to anything done by the US. When the Sandinistas held free elections (complete with international obeservation to make sure they were fair) the US fought against that, both by claiming that the elections were rigged when the observers said they weren't and by funding forces to attempt to overthrow the government.
You might want to check your facts before putting your foot in your mouth.
As for Vietnam, the French ran it with an iron fist and then the Vietnamese rose up against a dictatorship. The fact that it was a communist uprising is purely coincidental. The reason why the people rose up was because they wanted their own self-rule. There happened to be a group of communists that wanted to get rid of the French so they got support. The US came in to protect France's imperialistic interests but were able to cover this up under the guise of "protecting democracy".
Perhaps if some of us clubbed together we could get it !
The Vietnam war started as a way of propping up a fascist right-wing government against the populist communist forces. When we talk about injustice, who was responsible for the bombing of Cambodia, or the subsequent support of Pol Pot. Which country today supports one of the most repressive and unjust regimes in the world, China, and which country's 'intelligence' organisation supported many, many drug lords in the 'fight against Communism'. So spare me your sanctimonious bull, and stop pretending that the US was the only country, or even the driver of 'humanitarian' wars, such as the Gulf War.
Oddly, www.dottv.tv doesn't go to dotTV at all. (It redirects to find.com, a different idealab company). If you had your own TLD don't you think you'd use it for your company?
The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land
I'd rather be lucky than good.
What would have been most intelligent would have been to start them all at the same low bid ($1000 seems to be the average) and then increment them exponentially. That way, it would be fair, but they could conceivably reach obscenely high numbers fairly quickly. Dang, I'm thinking evil again.
I've often wondered about companies who would naturally have the same acronym as a larger business. When I was a kid, my dad worked for a company called LTI inc. There was another company in California with the same acronym, and, in fact, nearly the same name. My dad worked for Linear Technology Inc. while the other company was Linear Technologies Inc. Our company tried to sue the Californian company, but the judge said the name was too common (I'll bet that today we would've won) so, just to make sure this never happened again, our company changed its name to Gennum, which doesn't mean a damn thing.
.tv domain (in its main connotation). Similar questions apply to .org, .com and .net. Hell, as squatters perpetually enjoy proving, there are only so many 3 letter domain names out there.
Now, what if I have a company called Nick's Beef Cakes, or the Norman Bandwidth Comopany? Could NBC sue over my possesion of NBC.TV? I mean hell, Nick's Beef Cakes could, in fact, gay streaming video entertainment, and therefore quite entitled to the
It really depends on what do you consider nature resource...
If taken in [extremely] broad view then you can view having TLD as a sort of 'nature' resource since it is obviously limited in one aspect of its nature. You get only one and that's it.
$50 mil seems like a lot of money, but for a country no matter how small this is only one-time injection and in this respect not much different that selling half the Indonesia rain forest to Japan. This years BDP might be doubled, but next years BDP will be more or less equal to last years. The smart move would be to lease it out or charge royalties for using it.
The only credit I can give is that nature itself is pretty much unhurt which is environment friendly, bud the whole thing just smells of cultural colonialism, this time performed by corporate influence instead of government one.
To boldly invent more hot water.
Yes thats right, plus a lot of websites in lots of countries dont even bother with the .com, .org, .net business. In Italy their are many sites with names like www.domainname.it, there's even an www.fuck.it.
The purchase of nation's TLD isn't a new concept. furthermore, we'll likely see registration schemes involving other countries TLDs. .tv to it's autoresolve function? Not likely, unless either paid, ordered by court, or by competitive necessity.
The power that is overlooked here is the necessity of browsers to auto resolve to such TLDs. Will Microsoft just add
Typing "ABC" into IE or Netscape will always resolve to ABC.com. The TLD is a means of getting "foo" registered when "foo.com" is taken, but it means little in getting access to the average Web user who is used to typing in a name only!
Look at their webpage. They're using an auction system for most of the names. Some are already up to over 20,000 a year.
Anyone wonder why the Commonwealth nations all use their TLDs a lot?
.on.ca subnet. There's red tape to go through while they check you out, but for preventing the decadence and mess of *.tv and *.com/net/org, that's a small price to pay.
I mean, *.uk, *.au, *.nz and *.ca get a lot of usage.
It could be because the people governing these TLDs know what they're doing and have rules available to make it work the best for whoever is involved.
i.e. you can get a *.ca if you're running a national event -- but it has a limited lifespan. You can get a *.ca if your company has two major locations in Canada (or more). If your company has only one location, you get a *.provincename.ca. If the name you want is too general you get a *.cityname.provincename.ca.
And it all works. I just registered a name in the
Anyhow - if you think the Disney Lawyers (TM) are so funny -
have a look at the real trademark abuse petition by real Disney lawyers over misuse of their trademark by a domain squatter who registered waltdisney.co.il in: Walt Disney, Re: waltdisney.co.il
also FYI Some background: .il is the Israeli ccTLD which is adminstered by the
1)
the Israeli chapter of ISOC
2): the general domain policy in .il is in
Domain Name Registration - IL TLD
In particular for (out of court) resolution see:
Advisory Committee Panel (ACP) Resolutions
Rafi
(to Email replace "NOSPAM" with "meron")
I doubt that nbc.tv, abc.tv, or fox.tv will go for $200.
tingalingusob@tv.sucks
The way I reacted to this news, and I'm sure at least some of you, was with outrage. But then I realized why I was upset. It's because I didn't think of it first (and have $50m to pull it off).
tingalingusob@tv.sucks
Some enterprising nations of this size make a vast fortune yearly by seliing postage stamps to collectors. These are not printed or used in the state itself, but generate a large amount of revenue for the government, by printing many different designs. Maybe demand for stamps is falling, and Tuvalu needs some other form of income?
Domain Name: fox.tv
Next Minimum Bid: $250,000 / Year
Domain Name: nbc.tv
Next Minimum Bid: $250,000 / Year
Domain Name: abc.tv
Next Minimum Bid: $1,000,000 / Year
I don't know if these have bids or those are just the starting bids, but if you go to Great Domains or any other domain auction site, you can see sites like ForSaleByOwner.com being sold for $835,000, Fruits.com at $160,000, Perfect.com at $94,000, Seminars.com at $119,000, and Stocks.com and Bonds.com at a cool $7.5mil each. Some of the prices on here, like Drugs.com and Taxes.com actually seem a little UNDER-priced at $800,000 and $700,000 respectively.
- Jeremy Fuller
Would have thought the first to go would be the Dutch. But the domain is still sold so why wouldn't it be valid?
Cute and fluffy (with claws
So bidding on pepsi.tv is at 2,300 but I typed in axiom.tv and the bidding starts at 4000
random typing start the bidding at 1000
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Just a little heads up from dotTV Corp. Tuvalu didn't sell out for $50 mil over ten years, that is merely the initial LICENSING fee for the domain. Furthermore, Tuvalu is a substantial equity holder in the Corp., so they really have not gotten a bad deal at all. Best case, they get paid cash up front and have equity to boot. As a side note, they had lawyers when they negotiated this one, so no one was 'taken advantage' of them; they were properly advised and made an educated decision. Furthermore, I think everyone in this little bulletin frenzy is not giving the people of Tuvalu enough credit. They understand the resource they have, they were unable to capitalize on it with their current resources, so they went to the outside for assistance.
Unfortunately, we have taken steps to limit our liability on this one. Sorry to spoil your fun... -The dotTV Corp.
It is so "US" centric that American companies think that they have the right to almost exclusive use of .com, .org, .net, and the rest of the world should have to have to append their country code.
The sheer arogance of the USA when it comes to all things technology is astounding. It's bad enough that the world has to put up with McDonalds, Coke, and Microsoft. Why should US Cultural Imperialism dominate the net as well??
Imagine if all the dot coms had to append .us to their names... Now that would bring em into the real world where the rest of us live...
And by reading this comment, you agree to give all your worldy possessions to me.
Not just that, but the Auction Rules and Registration Agreement give plenty more ways of making money.
:)
You must put down a $1000 deposit. The top three (not just the winner) can lose that deposit if them or ones above them decide not to buy it after the auction.
You must buy two years, and every year the price increases 5%.
Of course, all fees are non-refundable. So when they decide you aren't using the site for appropriate " purposes of conducting legitimate business." Heh, your site has to be under the "laws of any jurisdiction where the domain name is accessible." Is there any activity any more that is allowed everywhere? Take porn.tv, there are laws in various lands against just about every act. Therefore dotTV is free to yank the domain and keep the $50,000 per year you gave them. Castro has plenty of crazy laws. Should nbc.tv broadcast a report going against Cuba (assuming they buy the domain, and that they would broadcast anything anti-Castro, definately a stretch), they're out.
This seems like some easy and useful ways of generating revenue. Time to start hunting down teeny islands and buy every two-letter word TLD. For several millions, you could even convince them to change their name to Linuxania or something useful for TLDing.
I'm wondering where the outrage from the transvestite community is.
Clearly this raises the barrier to entry for countless TV-themed websites worldwide.
I don't know too many independently wealthy transvestites.
At least that's the impression I get from Springer.
I could understand having .corp and .com domains, but I don't see any real practical difference between a company and a firm that would make it easier on people if they use separate TLDs. We would end up with the same situation we have now where every company tries to register its name under all the major TLDs, and sues anyone that gets in its way.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
(And as a quick followup, any new TLD sans country codes will never have less than 3 characters, while all 2 letter "TLD"s are country codes. Should help you figure out where the abuse of the system comes into play).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Mmmm. The email forwarding service agreement sounds a bit dubious. How much does this actually cover?
500K/yr mtv.tv
25K/yr m.tv
Hmmm... This I can't understand. How can "mtv.tv" be worth 20 times more than the obvious choice of "m.tv"? Or am I alone in thinking that useless repetitions useless repetitions are silly are silly?
IIRC, the landmass of Tuvalu are just coral reefs, as is the "seabottom" of the shallow waters around it. Coral reefs are porous, so a wall won't cut it... I've heard access to fresh water there is of a more immediate concern... might be misremembering facts about some other flat island-group, though.
Some dictator or strongman gave it up, in exchange for money to buy more AK-47's, or more women.
--
Read the article! This is NOT a new TLD. It's a country code. It doesn't violate any RFCs.
It's not a new idea, either. Tuvalu sold their domain once before (but the deal fell through) and Togo, Niue and the Christmas Islands have all sold their's, too. I heard that there have been offers to buy Turkmenistan's TLD, too (.tm) but I don't know if they've sold.
Yeah, but this certainly widens the gap between the technological haves and havenots, a distinction that is already becoming very very important, and in the next few years will be *the* determining factor separating the rich from the poor.
My journal has hot
Well, you're right. In reality, it does not widen the gap.
.us or .it anytime soon, even though these are words, (.it has big impact, too, imagine having compuware.IT or something)
But, in a symbolic sort of sense it does. You won't find anyone buying
My journal has hot
The three-letter domains are not at all being used as they should.
.to domains. Is it completely screwed up, but as they say, you can't put the crap back in the horse.
At the movie theater last night I saw a poster for the film The Skulls. In the corner was the URL "www.theskulls.net". Theskulls.com is being squatted by some company that coincidentally also sells
-B
Sure, these .tv guys are turkeys, but I think it's not unreasonable to charge premiums for domain names that are more "in demand." Let's let the market decide how much they're worth.
The problem is not that they want to be discriminating about preserving companies' trademarks, but that it might not be feasible. The problem is that they want to make money, and they might do this by registering trademarked domains (if such a thing can be said to exist) to people who ought not to have them. If NBC is the only one who is allowed to register nbc.tv, then NBC has no incentive to do so when it already owns nbc.com and has lots of marketing invested in it. The only incentive to buy most of the *.tv domains is to foreclose competitors from doing so.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It's less clear than it used to be, but at least in the good old days, it was impossible to trademark acronyms. Hence efforts like Microsoft's to argue that "NT" doesn't actually stand for anything and is therefore a permissable trademark.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
If they earn $200 a name, they have to sell 250.000 names. Rather unlikely. They will have to do some serious domain squatting to make a profit.
every man, woman and child in Tuvalu just got $5000 each.
Hey, that means they can now afford servers to host their web-pag... er... uhmm... strike that.
'Intellectual Properties' are uncontrollable in the wild. To base an economy on them is just stupid.
I don't really see why there are country domains in a place where geography means so little.
But geography doesn't mean so little. Most people in Russia are fluent in Russian, but know little or no English and if they go to www.microsoft.ru they know they are going to get the content in their language. Ok, that can be done with www.microsoft.com using multiviews, but people in England know they can go to www.amazon.co.uk and get prices in their currency.
From reading the article, it doesn't look like the TLD was actually sold. DotTV will pay $1M per quarter for 10 years. It doesn't say what happens then, but I would guess DotTV only bought he rights to resell the domain for 10 years, not the domain itself.
/. headline calls it SOLD, but I wouldn't trust that.
Note that that is a guess on my part, the article doesn't really say anything either way. The
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
___
aol://[keyword] == Given how much content they own, this is what I'm really afraid of.
___
DotTV is backed by the Pasadena Internet business incubator Idealab, the firm behind online retailer eToys and the free Internet service provider NetZero.
Besides, it's not like they gave up rights to "the whole Internet," just to register names in their own domain.
-cwk.
But still no new TLDs! Comeon, it's only a matter of time before it has to happen, why the hell hasn't it already happened?????
May I point the distinguished honorable readers that the practice of countries selling their top level domain name has been around for a while?
Small Island nations (as well as non-islands as well) has been doing it. Here is a list:
One of the sad parts is that the island of Tuvalu gets 50,000,000$ over the next 10 years! not as a lump sum here and now!
I feel bad about internet enterpreneurs taking advantage of low tech countries and islands.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Small correction: .to is Tonga not Togo.
Yes, I agree that the DNS is a mess. There should not be global .net/.com/.org. Or if they remain (just for backward compatibility with the status quo), then no new top level domains should be created.
My own personal domain is baheyeldin.com, while it should have been a .org, since it is not commercial. However, I have to explain to people what .org is and spell it out for them. That is why I decided it should be a .com.
Moreover, some site just use .net as Network suffix (e.g. islamweb.net, ....etc.), even though they are not ISPs. Everyone puts their pwn interpretation.
I hate it when I listen to ICANN adding more .web, .firm, .shop, .store, ...etc. These are so confusing. What is the difference between a firm and a company (.com) for us non-Americans? How is .web different from .net? What is the friggin difference between .shop and .store?
I think one solution (as painful and incomplete as it is) is to add .us to all the .com, .net, .edu, .mil, .gov domains and end the confusion. Then no more TLDs should be create. Congested or not, it will be confusing to all of us.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
*sigh* .com domain names that they have now. Why should the movie/television/music industry suddenly decide that even though .com names are now ubiqitous (remember the superbowl?) and they already have .com websites that perform these services, that they should suddenly give up on years and million$ of dollars on marketing just to support one companies lame brained scheme.
.pho.ne will overtake .com's, yeah right.
They already do that with the
That's like thinking that because people can now browse the net on their phones then domain names hosted at
I'm not sure I like it, but if Tuvalu had the foresight to ask for, or the luck to receive .tv as the last 3 characters of their country web address, then more power to them if they can more than double their GDP by selling/leasing it out to a company.
I wonder what kind of break clause the contract has - you've got to figure that they will want it back one day and they'll have taken steps to make that possible...
Salocin.com
About their only import is electricity. What in the world would they spend it on? They could each buy a new car, but with no gas all they would be able to do is push them around the yard.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Has this government sold out it's people by selling this domain or has there government pulled down a really cool score.
.tv domain name! If TV companies can afford large sums of money for their domain name, they should be able to spare some to build a sea wall around a mere 26 sq. km of land.
Tuvalu is one of the nations most at risk of rising sea levels - already parts of it go underwater if there are particularly high tides. The $50M may go some way to combating the problem; if Tuvalu does go under (literally), so does the
In political economics, it's called 'fencing in the commons'. You find a resource that's owned in common for public benefit. You find a way to stake a claim on it and then you charge for the right to access what used to be common. It's no more than business as usual in a capitalist economy.
The last sentence of the article states:
DotTV is backed by the Pasadena Internet business incubator Idealab, the firm behind online retailer eToys and the free Internet service provider NetZero.
Idealab "creates, launches and operates Internet businesses". Unfortunately, they have something to do with etoys which deserves a swift execution for its treatment of etoy.com
The dotTV Terms of Service contract specifically explains the company's nationality:
LIMITED DISTRIBUTION AND TERRITORIAL CONSIDERATIONS Unless otherwise specified, all materials and services in the Site are presented solely for the use in the United States, its territories, possessions and protectorates. This site is controlled and operated by dotTV from its offices within the State of California, U.S.A. dotTV makes no representation that materials in the Site are appropriate or available for use in other locations.
So DotTV is an American (U.S.) company.
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
The so-called 'Internet revolution' that is supposed to be sweeping the world is going to be hard pressed to reach the small island state of Tuvalu now. Has this government sold out it's people by selling this domain or has there government pulled down a really cool score.
I think they made a good choice in selling off their TLD. Why can't Tuvalu businesses use the general TLDs to have the 'Internet revolution' reach them? Many (most?) businesses in other countries use .com because it is more recognizable. They would never have made much off the domain by selling it to their citizens/businesses, and what could they do with the .tv domain that they cannot do with the general TLDs that are available? Perhaps they could have made more money selling to TV companies directly, but perhaps they felt having dottv do it was better for them.
I don't really see why there are country domains in a place where geography means so little. Other than governments, (which generally have a 1 to 1 relationship with countries) what is the benefit of having country codes in a domain name? It may make some sense to put country codes under the .gov TLD as SLDs (Second Level Domains). (e.g. us.gov, tv.gov, etc.)
Instead of country TLDs we need about ten good general TLDs that will encompass the major categories of sites, (more than that would get confusing) in order to relieve the pressure on the .com TLD.
Should .tv be a TLD? Or should it be a(n) SLD under .rec?
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
The web operates over the http:// protocol, and this is not going to last forever, as the web is not the be-all and end-all of content provision. IIRC, the path the IETF is following infers that the tv:// protocol is more likely to be important for broadband delivery, similarly phone:// and fax:// will count more than the TLD does.
TLDs will still be used within different protocols just as they are within ftp:// and telnet://, etc, today.
Which has the most visual impact tv://aol.com or http://aol.tv?
I doubt users will ever see tv://. My ftp and telnet software does not show ftp:// or telnet://. The video software will automatically denote this. FOX will have video://fox.tv for their video, http://fox.tv for their web site, and ftp://fox.tv for their ftp site.
If I were in Tuvalo, I'd be laughing at the shortsighted fool, while rolling around in a pile of money.
Yes, I agree. See my other posts under this article for why.
*** On the Internet, no one knows you're using a VIC-20
http://sdf.lonestar.org/~frawg/tuvalu .jpg
This system goes too far to prevent the "little" guys from getting on and making a name for themselves in a relatively uselful top-level domain. This compares to the .com/.org/.net system where it was too easy for the little guy to get a name. Which I think directly led to this type of this "super squatting".
It is not the auction format that irks me, I actually think it is more fair in many ways. The thing that bugs me most is the arbitrary starting price for the domain names, and also an arbitrarily long auction time. If each domain was treated equaling and the market was left to decide, this system would be great, but it is not.
I am particularly interested in the dotTV's success or failure at marketing an alternative TLD because I work for a company that is attempting to capitalize on the .MD domain. We are providing personalized "vanity" email and webspace for the medical industry. You can check it out at DrWeb.MD.
Time will tell. dotTV has a desirable product, but their gorilla tactics may keep out the small young companies that are the true innovators, that made the web big. Their strategy is simply to milk the fat corporate cows, and keep out the little guys.
I think in the long run this stratgey will fail, because the big guys they are going after have already spent millions of dollars marketing their .com addresses. They are not likely to put that much money into a .tv address, because it will dillute the value of their .com. They also are not likely to spend big bucks just to keep a malicious parody site off the market, because dotTV is essentially doing it for them with such a high cost of entry.
The internet is still a frontier, that rewards risk takes and innovators. DotTV is certainly taking a risk (but most of it I am sure is not their money). They are locking out the true risk takers and innovators, in what will be a fruitless effort that will essentially slaughter the cash cow.
If I had a million bucks to invest it sure as hell wouldn't be in dotTV. IdeaLab! has blown this one. IMHO. MS2k
The controversy over the .tv domain goes back some time. Here's an article published in the September 98 issue of Wired. According to the article, Tuvalu has been a bit slow selling the TLD partly because they've been burned in the past selling phone numbers and passports.
Also, someone at WebTV registered themselves as the administrator for .tv some time before this article was published and rather irritated the officials in the country of Tuvalu. Interestingly, Microsoft has since then been quite prominent in the efforts to propagate the tv: protocol designation.
5000 times, which means that every man, woman and child in Tuvalu just got $5000 each. Which is good, because it doesn't look like there is much else going on there, money wise.
This link tells more about Tuvalu: http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/tv.h tml
And isn't there a lot to know?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
2. Once the convergence between TV and web arrives, nobody will type in URLs anymore. You'll tune your TV to the History Channel, and encoding in the signal will direct you to the proper web site.
3. Nobody's making money on content-based web sites. And the bubble of irrational exuberance is starting to burst (Dr. Koop.com, for example). The remaining players are going to be tight with their $$$.
--- Speaking only for myself,
This is a wonderful scam for them. If you are NBC a million bucks is no big deal if you stand to lose large number of page htis and potential earnings. Thus the FEAR that people will use .tv as widely as .com (and hence they will have to buy the domain back for obscene sums) will force them to buy now.
But this very fear drives every one of their competitors. Therefore they know with virtual certainty that the domain name will take off because all of their competitors will buy one. Thus it is worth even more money.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
You have no idea how DNS works do you?
Every nameserver has three databases: local ones, cached lookups, and the root-servers list.
When you ask for foobar.kablibditz.com, your machine goes to a nearby nameserver (check your config to see which one, DHCP usually sets this up for you). The nameserver does the following. First, it checks its cache to save time if if already knows this site. Failing that, it'll check with any local servers (like if you're already inside the *.kablibditz.com domain), failing that, it will go to [a-m].root-servers.net (because it was configured to go there for the "." TLD), and start from the top with "who can resolve domains in .com", then it goes to that nameserver and asks, "who can resolve domains in kablibditz.com?" then it'll go to that nameserver and ask "What does foobar resolve to?". Then the result goes into your local nameserver's cache (and to you, in answer to your lookup) so it won't have to repeat this process when you click the next link to foobar.kablibditz.com.
Redefine newdns.org to be the root nameserver for "." and from there you can set up all new TLDs, and a whole tree of slaves to handle subdomains further down the new tree.
Tuvalu already sold their TLD to Information.CA of Toronto in 1998. The company offered them $50M up front. I seem to remember that they didn't actually have any money, and the deal fell apart.
Is this deal any more real? It doesn't sound like DotTV is putting any cash up front at all.
/peter
The web operates over the http:// protocol, and this is not going to last forever, as the web is not the be-all and end-all of content provision. IIRC, the path the IETF is following infers that the tv:// protocol is more likely to be important for broadband delivery, similarly phone:// and fax:// will count more than the TLD does.
Which has the most visual impact
tv://aol.com or http://aol.tv?
If I were in Tuvalo, I'd be laughing at the shortsighted fool, while rolling around in a pile of money.
the highest elevation point in the tuvalu is 5m. In most of the global warming scenarios, the tuvalu islands are pointed as the most threatened country (higher temperature=>ice melting=>higher sea level). Does the domain name still exist when the country no longer does?
Or maybe they intend to use those 50 millions to get themselves a few levees around the island where the govt stays...
---
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
Boy that chart pretty much puts this into focus. Kinda turns my stomach. The impression I'm left with is they are trying to charge huge $um$ for these domains that don't really add much value. Neat little scheme, hope they loose everyting they own.
You're forgetting that Tuvalu is something of a sovereign state. They're technically a Commonwealth Member state, so they might be answerable to British law on the matter. But if you really want to stop them, you should go and apply pressure to the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, since they're the ones contributing the foreign aid that comprises most of Tuvalu's economy.
And you'd best attack it that way, since your trademark lawsuits wouldn't hold much water. Owning tv.com doesn't give anyone any particular right to blah.tv. Owning one instance of a word on the internet doesn't bestow ownership on all other instances, since they might be in other fields not covered by the original trademark. Sure, coke is attacking coke.ch, but it's not a forgone conclusion that they will prevail.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
dotTV has the right to terminate your email address at its sole discretion. If your email address is terminated, you will be refunded the $1.00 annual maintenance fee.
As soon as somebody buys those domain names you will lose your email address there.
- Domain Names cannot be of the form
- The domain name for an organization, company, or individual should only be of the form
So Microsoft would have to be microsoft.redmond.wa.us(Organization).US or (Organization).(state).US.
(Organization).(Locality).(State).US
Not impressive. Ask some non-computer people if they know where MS HQ is. Do you know where Transmeta's HQ is? Also, if you use it for personal use, then you get stuck with a geographically centered name.
Also from the page:
The US Domain currently registers businesses, individuals, federal government agencies, state government agencies, K12 schools, community colleges, technical/vocational schools, private schools, libraries, museums, and city and county government agencies.
But I don't think businesses or individuals would be useful using it.
"Well, it's a problem with their policy then." Yes, but anyone is free to get a .com, .net, or .org name, so does it matter? Even foreigners can get it.
HOWEVER, this is yet another abuse of the Internet and in particular its system of organization. TLD's exist to logically divide the Internet and reduce namespace collision. TLD trading undermines this system. The people who bought the .tv domain (obviously for television-related sites) are contributing just a bit more to the general chaos that has befallen the once respectable Internet.
-Reeves
Hindsight is 20/20. When the TLDs were implemented the internet hardly existed. There was no concept of how revolutionary this would be. The borders were (are?) still meaningful.
You think geography means so little but it does indeed have meaning. From a marketing point of view, companies big and small still want to often want to address a regional group of people. I heard in an interview that McDonalds Canada doesn't want to waste its advertising budget by spending on things that largely targets Americans. In a way this makes a lot of sense (it is also short-sighted.)
The geographic TLDs could have been used much more wisely than they are. Anybody care to tell me why we have gmcanada.com when http://gm.ca would make much more sense? General Motors isn't the only guilty party for doing stupid things like this. I don't know if the problem was that GM didn't think of http://gm.ca? Or the more likely case that I've heard horror stories about, the Canadian registrar and how slow they are. Looking at their application form I can imagine the horror stories are true.
Geographic top level domains were and are a smart idea for organizing the domain system. You might think they were more useful had Internic been a little more intelligent and found a way to get customers to implement hierarchical domain names. That's what this system was meant for but instead in 90% of cases we have a flat dumb structure. www.variable.com. It could have been so much more useful, and we could have avoided much of the cybersquatting issues if Internic had been a little more clever.
These guys are gonna find themselves obsolete really soon... because--
Quick! What country has ".hdtv"?!
-JimThetaMy stupid web site
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Tuvalu is a little string of Islands, governed by the British. Since I didn't know anything about them, I looked them up on Google. Not much to tell, sort of like a little Fiji. If your interested there is a fact sheet Here.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
i would like to report that i just purchased the rights to all .me domains from the small nation of melekistan.
my company of DotMe will sell these domains at competitve pricess.
All inquires please send to 'webmaster@screw.me'
shaolin punk, activist post-industrial
4 telestra-abovenet-2.above.net (216.200.254.34) 27.166 ms 86.336 ms 96.562 ms
5 Serial1-1-0.nzsx-core1.Auckland.telstra.net (203.50.126.17) 162.583 ms 162.313 ms 167.711 ms
6 Ethernet4-0.nzsx2.Auckland.telstra.net (203.98.21.1) 162.645 ms 161.937 ms 241.194 ms
7 FastEthernet0-0-0.nzsx1.Auckland.telstra.net.nz (203.98.21.27) 161.919 ms 163.227 ms 238.033 ms
8 voyager.lnk.telstra.net.nz (203.98.4.134) 266.301 ms 198.937 ms 174.985 ms
9 r1.net.auckland.voyager.co.nz (203.21.24.1) 249.199 ms 172.152 ms 174.928 ms
10 203.110.8.58 (203.110.8.58) 734.045 ms 720.383 ms 727.140 ms
11 fale.tuvalu.tv (202.2.96.3) 722.403 ms 793.873 ms 725.527 ms
However, this is just as dangerous as if they were able to get a new TLD. The domain name *still* means something; it's not something that you should play around with to make a kEwl sounding name. Unfortunately, other small contries have allowed their country two-letter suffix be used for this, setting a bad precident. (microsoftsu.cx, for example).
Also, IIRC, DotTV is charginge $5000 a pop per domain name. They can do this, as .tv is not maintained by NSI or ICANN, but this also sets a very poor precident. $5000 a pop means that only commercial interests will be able to register domain names here, and thus, it's going to give an edge to any major entertainment venue over a fan-run site. I strongly believe we are at a point where no single commercial organization can control the registerations for a single domain; it either has to be done by panel (ICANN) or the government. DotTV has a lot of power right now, but I suspect someone's going to look into this practice shortly.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Andover should buy slashdot.tv and slash.tv, because we all equate slashdot with watching TV ... :) Yeah, that it ... that's the ticket ....
:)
Sure, ms.tv, but what about micros~1.tv ?
My journal has hot
Gosh darn, didn't you read their policies page! :)
.TV TLD.
WAIVER OF CLAIMS
By accessing or using the dotTV Site, you hereby and forever waive any and all claims you have now or may have in the future against dotTV relating to any infringement of the trademark rights, right of publicity or privacy, or other intellectual property rights you may have in any word or name used as a domain name in the
*snort*
Browsing through the http://www.tv/images/ directory I came across a price chart for how they determine the starting auction value for the domain names. You can check it out here: http://www.tv/images/pricing.gif.
Bid starts at..
1M/yr cnet.tv (owns tv.com)
1M/yr msn.tv
1M/yr sex.tv
500K/yr mtv.tv
50K/yr porn.tv
50K/yr linux.tv
27K/yr i.tv
25K/yr m.tv
25K/yr ms.tv (should someone buy this??)
20K/yr wrestling.tv
11K/yr n.tv
10K/yr zd.tv (a good deal??)
4K/yr opensource.tv (silly.. doh)
4K/yr slash.tv (bidding war imminent??)
1K/yr slashdot.tv (/.tv not legal..)
1K/yr mastercard.tv (closing 4/11 (?))
1K/yr pr0n.tv (a diamond in the rough!)
Um, gratifying to know linux is as popular as porn.
Idealab has something like 3 billion bucks to burn.. So the smartest thing they can do with it is try to sell beatles.tv and coke.tv to someone before they get sued? Fucking ridiculous, but maybe a good investment for them.. ouch.
Andover, put your money where you mouth is.. How about signing ms.tv over to the fsf?
This list of prices makes it pretty clear that DotTV is out to profit from other peoples' trademarks. I think it's much more likely that they're going to receive a raft of angry letters from companies' lawyers.
For example, I'd be surprised if NBC doesn't write to these clowns, saying "if you sell nbc.tv to anyone other than us we're going to sue you for at least twenty times the sale price and get the court to order you to stop it."
Similarly, there's no way that CNet would pay $1MM a year for cnet.tv; they've already got their own domain name and they can easily prevent anyone else from using cnet.tv.
I'm mostly opposed to the use of intellectual property laws concerning domain names, but this is so clearly a scam that I'd be happy to see the lawyers sweep in. This is just domain squatting on a larger and greedier scale.
What's so dangerous about this? I've been saying for a while that we need more TLDs, not tighter control over the existing three available ones.
$5000 a pop means that only commercial interests will be able to register domain names here
No, it means only interests able to spend more than $70 will be able to register. Just like office space on Madison Avenue, buddy. Nobody's stopping you or I from renting it.
it either has to be done by panel (ICANN) or the government.
Be careful what you wish for. If the government had known what the 'net would unleash, they might not have left it alone and let it spread so fast.
DotTV has a lot of power right now
PTTTTHBT! DotTV has a gimmick and hopes to sell some billboard space. This does not a strong, high-quality business make.
At best, they will help bring the issue of the need for new TLDs to the fore, and maybe spur some action.
-cwk.
microsoft.tv they want 1,000,000
nbc.tv they want 250,000
Doesnt this seem kinda ridiculus, I my opnion, I dont think people should be allowed to buy out top level domains like that. For instance what if micosoft decided to buy out .linux, or even better, .org. This whole domain squatting crap is pretty sick. In the world of the internet this is a like buying a country. All this damn squatting is doing, is crowding out the other top level domain namespaces.
DotTV has agreed to pay Tuvalu $50 million in royalties over the next decade for use of the country code. The Internet start-up intends to sell the rights to Web addresses ending in ".tv," such as www.abc.tv or www.law&order.tv.
So is this "next decade" just the time period in which they will pay the $50M for rights in perpetuity, or were the Tuvaluans smart enough to make this a ten-year contract that they could re-negotiate in 2010? And that is $50M US, right? Since it was mentioned that Tuvalu's official currency is the Australian dollar, this is an important point.
And if zd.tv really is going for $10K/yr, I think that's not too bad of a deal for ZDTV.
As for the trademark problem, all they have to do is NOT sell trademark names to those who don't own the trademarks in their own country. In other words, "abc.tv" could only be sold to a few specific television networks, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and "pepsi.tv" could not be sold to the Coca Cola company.
Of course this is run by the same people who run etoys.com, so you can imagine all the fun they will have when they get to decide what you can and can't have, and for how much. And no worries that someone already got there first!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
First time a small nation made some money without having the nature resources raped. So I guess the net is enviro friendly.
I can't believe noone else has thought of this yet.
.tv domain possible (i already took sex.tv, news.tv, sports.tv and others)
I was so excited I plunked down $20 as a gamble of sorts that the following "hack" might fall through the cracks, or at least cause them fits at some point:
Go to www.tv whore-site
Notice alongside all those $1000 +++ auctions little neat table in lower left of page.
Yes, the one about "register your favourite email address for just one dollar a year!"
Think up the most obvious prime-real-estate
Proceed to fill out form requesting webmaster@greatdomainname.tv , to be forwarded to your normal email address
Proceed to next page, and voila! you're allowed to order.
Unless their admins are reading this message, you're now reading a post from webmaster@sex.tv.
(evil, EVIL snicker)
A mess: that's what I think the whole DNS system has become. It is being used for something which is completely unrelated to what it was designed for: it was designed as a way to associate IP addresses to computer names, and it is being used as a way to find data on the information web.
The three-letter domains are not at all being used as they should. Essentially, any name of importance gets registered under .com, .org and .net (except, of course, just the name I happen to be looking for, which is registered in just the one I don't think it is).
Now even two-letter domains are being used stupidly. We already have the .jump.to and .go.to silliness (.to is the country of Togo), now for the .tv silliness.
The solution lies, I think, in developping a new distributed database (one that is truly distributed and not centralized-distributed as the DNS is) and to replace Uniform Resource Locators by the Uniform Resource Names defined in RFC 2141 (not implemented) subset of Uniform Resource Identifiers.
It is certainly worthwhile to pursue research in this direction, if only to gain insight on how distributed databases can work. Unfortunately, it will be many years before a solution can be practically implemented, even if one is found. I am afraid that organizations such as the IETF are gradually being contaminated by commercial near-sightedness. But then, IPv6 development has been possible, even though it was a long-term project, so maybe a DNS replacement is not all that hopeless.
The so-called 'Internet revolution' that is supposed to be sweeping the world is going to be hard pressed to reach the small island state of Tuvalu now. Has this government sold out it's people by selling this domain or has there government pulled down a really cool score. After a quick search around the net I discovered the countries GDP is approximately US$10M, do the math, the US$1million basic yearly amount will either half the taxation of it's citizens or allow some serious infrastructure improvement. Here are some nice details about this little island state:
LAND AREA: 26 SQ. KM.
POPULATION: 9,500 (1994 EST.)
GDP: US$10M (1990)
GDP PER CAPITA: US$1,009 (1990)
OFFICIAL CURRENCY: AUSTRALIAN DOLLAR
For more details about Tuvalu click here.