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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.
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:
The US taxpayer paid for the development and initial deployment of the Internet (if .COM actually were a perk rather than a nuisance, that in itself would be ample justification). .COM and friends were US domains because there were no non-US domains at all. Today, US companies still don't have a choice: .COM is their top level domain; the .US domain serves different purposes.
It would have been nice if US companies could have moved to .CO.US or something like that when the Internet became more international, but that simply wasn't practical; after more than a decade of US .COM names, changing this would have made the lives of lots of people miserable. Besides, nobody could have foreseen the domain name craze of today, so it simply didn't seem to matter all that much.
Rather than complaining I'd suggest actually exercising some restraint: before you, wherever you may be, try to stake out your place in .COM land, keep in mind that you are really a guest in the US name space, and that by registering your domain in .COM, you may be causing problems for US folks who really don't have any other place to go.
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.
(a) The Net was not "tiny" before the Web -- there was superexponential growth long before 1993.
(b) The Web, in the sense it was "invented" anywhere, was invented at CERN.
(c) The Web only took off when someone called NCSA published an easy-to-use, graphical browser for it. Who was NCSA? The National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Whose "National Center"? The United States.
(d) The US still supplies and uses the most Internet bandwidth and resources; either recently or real soon, the rest of the world together will just about equal the US usage.
Like it or not, the Net was an American invention and remains a predominantly US space. It is changing, and rightly, but it isn't there and it's not entirely reasonable to ask the largest installed base to simply change.
Of course, the invention of a rational TLD system would do much to redress these inequities. After all, in the end, they're just numbers.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
If you were from Tuvalu, you'd be very happy right now. Wow, $4700 for you -- right out of thin air! Normally, you'd have to work about 5.8 years to earn this pile of money. (Source: CIA World Factbook.)
--
Industrial space for lease in Flatlandia.
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.