Name: How This Island Got 10% of Their Money by Chance
Uploaded: 2020-01-09T07:07:04.000Z
Duration: 5 min 20 s
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You're probably going to need to zoom in because Tuvalu is the forth smallest country

in the world by area and second smallest by population.

Only 10,000 people live there which is less than Kirksville, Missouri—a town who's

main attraction is the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine.

Tuvalu lies about halfway between Sydney, Australia and Honolulu, Hawaii so it is isolated.

The main island stretches a mere 2,000 feet across at it's widest and space is so limited

that, when not used for flights, the airport's runway is used as a public park and gathering

Tuvalu also has the lowest total GDP of any country worldwide.

Of course it doesn't help that it's the second least populous country and the least

populous country, the Vatican, literally has a bathtub worth two billion dollars, but the

overall gross domestic product of this country is a mere $32 million.

Just, for some reference, that's less than the amount the US government spends on printing

Just to be more clear, that's 85 times less than the amount the US government spends on

printing each year because the US government spends $2.7 billion on printing every year.

The point is that Tuvalu is very small, very isolated, and very poor.

When you're situated in the middle of the Pacific, it can be tough to make money.

A lot of other Pacific island countries rely on income from tourism, but it's particularly

Its airport only sees three flights a week from Nadi, Fiji and this 650 mile trip costs

Auckland, the nearest large city, is also just as close to Antartica as it is to Tuvalu,

so, they make their money by killing… fish that is.

Not only do 42% of Tuvaluans work in fishing, but the country also has an enormous exclusive

economic zone in which they have exclusive rights to resources so they sell fishing licenses

to foreign ships which provides a significant portion of the government income, but the

country's most interesting source of income came to them entirely by chance.

If you remember Half as Interesting episode four, back before all my jokes became terrible,

I talked about the International Organization for Standardization which sets standards on

One of them is standard 3166 which defines two-letter codes for each and every country

so, for example, Japan got JP, Romania got RO, and Guatemala got GT, but then the internet

In an internet address, there is generally a third-level domain, a second-level domain,

and the top-level domain, which is what we're interested in.

The top-level domain is the last part of a domain name such as .com, .org, .net, .gov,

Starting in 1985, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which assigns top-level domains

and has a pretty terrible website for the organization that basically runs the internet,

started creating top-level domains for specific countries and rather than just choosing codes

for each country, they took the ISO 3166 list and used the pre-set codes for each country,

and here's where Tuvalu got really lucky.

Their code was “tv” and so their top-level domain was “.tv.”

As it turned out the internet did not fail like journalist Clifford Stoll predicted when

he wrote in 1995, “you can't tote [a] laptop to the beach.

Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books

and newspapers straight over the Internet.

A few people even starting watching video on the internet and “.tv” was the perfect

top-level domain for new streaming sites and so Tuvalu starting selling domains.

Originally a company called DotTv bought the licensing rights for the .tv domain but in

2002 this company was acquired by Verisign which, aside from being a nightmare of a name

for dyslexics, is the registrar for a bunch of different top-level domains including .com,

It's believed that the country of Tuvalu now receives $2-3 million per year from the

Up until 2000, Tuvalu was not part of the United Nations but they joined after this

deal went through because they could finally afford the $100,000 joining fee.

The revenues from this domain now amount to almost 10% of the country's GDP and have

been used to pay for crucial development in this tiny island country.

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