This tiny South Pacific nation owns one of the most lucrative internet suffixes in the world
This week, Amazon purchased Twitch — a company that live-streams people playing video games as if they were sports — for $1.1 billion, training a spolight not only on the lucrative world of online gaming, but on web-streaming services like Twitch that use .tv as an internet suffix.
Because of a wrinkle in internet history, that suffix is owned by Tuvalu, a South Pacific island nation whose total land mass is about 10 square miles. The New York Times explains:
The current operator of .tv is the company Verisign, which reportedly pays Tuvalu a couple million dollars a year in fees.
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Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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