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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.
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.