Tuvalu's .tv Domain Licensing — Turning a Two-Letter Country Code into a National Revenue Engine

When the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority allocated country-code domains in 1995, Tuvalu — population around 11,000 — was assigned '.tv', a string with no obvious commercial connection to the nation but an obvious appeal to the television and, later, live-streaming industry.

Tuvalu's government leased management of the domain to a series of private registry operators. Verisign held the registry from 2001, and after renegotiating around 2014 (following Twitch's rise and its acquisition by Amazon), paid the Tuvalu government approximately US$5 million a year — at the time equivalent to roughly one-twelfth of the country's gross national income.

In December 2021, following a competitive tender run by the Ministry of Finance and the Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation, GoDaddy Registry won the contract to operate '.tv', agreeing to pay the government US$10 million a year — double the prior Verisign rate — reflecting continued growth in '.tv' registrations driven by streaming platforms such as Twitch.

The arrangement has given Tuvalu, one of the world's smallest and most climate-vulnerable economies, a recurring, negotiable revenue stream from a digital asset rather than aid or resource extraction. It is a distinctive example of a micro-state actively managing and re-tendering a sovereign digital asset to capture rising market value, though the model is not transferable to jurisdictions without an equivalently marketable domain string.

Read the full analysis: https://pina.com.fj/2021/12/16/tuvalu-chooses-godaddy-for-lucrative-dot-tv-domain-name/