Fergie's Tech Blog

Tokelau Cashes In On Domain Name

Claudine Beaumont writes in The Telegraph.co.uk:

Tokelau – comprised of three coral atolls that lie about 500 miles north of Western Samoa, halfway between New Zealand and Hawaii – has licensed the website domain extension assigned to the island, and is using the money it earns from the project to pay for computers and internet access.

Just as the United Kindgom was given the “.uk” suffix for use in website addresses, Tokelau was granted the “.tk” suffix for its website addresses.

In 2001, the island’s government was approached by Joost Zuurbier, an internet entrepreneur, with a view to his company licensing the rights to the website extension and sharing some of the revenue generated from these sites with the Tokelau government and its people.

Since the service launched in 2005, more than 1.6 million domain names with the “.tk” suffix have been created worldwide, and around 10,000 new sites are registered on a daily basis.

posted by Fergie @ 9/13/2007 12:01:00 PM