Dot TV: Buys Tuvalu's way into U.N.
"It's very exciting," said the soft-spoken Ionatana, just hours before his appearance before the General Assembly and the raising of his nation's flag outside the United Nations building. "This fulfills a long-term dream of our previous leaders."
The dream was made possible thanks to a strange confluence between the country's name and the dotcom revolution that has changed the world.
The nation of Tuvalu is a string of nine Polynesian islands located east of Fiji. The name means "eight standing together" -- the ninth island only recently became inhabited. Though it has enjoyed a relationship with the UN, Tuvalu could only this year apply for formal admission and pay the attendant fees - about $30,000 in its case.
The money came as a result of a contract with a California company called Dot TV, which had a different sort of dream from that of the people of Tuvalu. The idea was to sell to the public what they consider to be prime Internet real estate: Web addresses that end in ".tv".
To accomplish that required making a deal with Ionatana and his country, for they were the ones who were lucky enough to be assigned ".tv" when domain names were assigned to countries in 1991. They agreed to license the name in exchange for an equity stake in the company and roughly $50 million over the next decade.
The 10,000 inhabitants of Tuvalu are perhaps the most poignant recipients of the dotcom grandeur that has made so many people rich these last five years.
"They hadn't taken the steps to monetize the name," explained Lou Kerner, chief executive of Dot TV, who said he'd heard that others, including Microsoft, had tried to persuade Tuvalu into licensing the name.
"Monetizing" and other words that comprise the lingua franca of the Internet age aren't part of the vocabulary of Tuvalu because the Internet has yet to sweep the tiny nation. That's in large part because more than half of Tuvalu, which has long relied on its fishing for income, didn't even have electricity until recently.
That's all changing. With the $17 million Kerner said the nation has received to date, improvements are being made to the infrastructure that were previously only hopes and dreams. Generators are being installed. Hospitals and schools are being staffed. Improvements will be made to accommodate larger planes on the airstrip.
Only 1,000 tourists visit Tuvalu each year, and that could change as well. Kerner, a former analyst with Goldman Sachs, is making a trip in October with a delegation from Dot TV to see the land that is making his company possible and the people who own a stake in it.
"This has been incredibly gratifying," he said of the bounty being provided to the Tuvaluan people. Not to mention surprising.
Though he won't give specific numbers about the number of domain names registered to date, Kerner said he's been amazed at how quickly the company has grown since launching last April, how global the reach has been, and how vast an array of businesses have registered names.
"Real estate, retailers, and banks have been among our top registrants," he said. The notion is that as broadband opens up a new world for streaming media on the Web, more companies will want to have the Dot TV domain as their online presence."
Meanwhile, the people of Tuvalu are, understandably, catching Internet fever, hawking over their piece of the Web like any good stockholder. Kerner said the minutes of the board of directors are sent to Tuvalu and are read on national radio for all to hear.
And, said Ionatana, he's warmed up to the notion of the Internet. "At first," he said, "I didn't understand."
Sitting in the United Nations on an early September day, you can be sure he now does.