My husband and I were browsing the CIA World Factbook the other day and happened upon the entry for Tuvalu. While you’ve never heard of Tuvalu, you might have noticed its Internet domain, .tv, popping up on URLs lately. It turns out (you can read about it in the Background section at the above link) that Tuvalu licensed out its domain name for $50 million over 12 years, or a little over $4 million a year. Now that’s a lot of money to you or I, but it’s not a lot to a country, right? Well, it turns out that Tuvalu is one of the world’s smallest countries (by several measures) and with a population of over 11,000, has a GDP of a little over $12 million. That means that the leasing of their country’s domain generates one third of their GDP. Not a bad investment I’d say. They apparently also lease their area code for use in 900 numbers. Not a bad deal at all.
My time in Australia will soon come to an end, and I’ve greatly enjoyed it. Sydney is a beautiful city; I highly recommend it. I thought I might spend a moment commenting on the cultural differences that I’ve noticed during my month here.
I think the most prominent of them, is that Australians don’t fear risk like Americans do. At the Sydney Harbor, the railings are small and somebody could easily fall in if they leaned over the edge. When I went to the Tarronga zoo, I was surprised by how close visitors could get to the animals (one emu came inches from a woman who turned her back on the enclosure and sat on the wall). I chatted with one of the workers on the Sydney Harbor ferries, and apparently several people each year fall overboard into the harbor from the ferry! Over and over I found myself commenting on the fact that in Sydney you can do things that you could never do in the USA.
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