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On a tiny island,
catchy Web name sparks a battle
Page 1 of 6
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
By Christopher Rhoads, The Wall Street Journal
The arrival of the Internet brought a rare bit of good fortune to
Niue, a tiny, impoverished island in the South Pacific.
Its national Internet suffix, dot-nu, has become a big hit in
Sweden, as "nu" means "now" in Swedish. An entrepreneur in Medfield,
Mass., named Bill Semich, who acquired the rights to operate and sell
the dot-nu domain name in the late 1990s, has plowed some of the
profits from Sweden into making Niue (pronounced New-Ay) the world's
first nation with free wireless Internet for all of its citizens,
about 1,200 people.
But that success has thrown the island, which is about 1 1/2 times
the area of Washington, D.C., into turmoil. Some officials charge they
were cheated out of what they now see as an important and profitable
national asset. "This is a huge issue of national development for us,"
says Richard Hipa, the managing director of Telecom Niue. "This is
something that we should have run, and we were robbed of that."
The island's government has locked horns with the 62-year-old Mr.
Semich, whose company is called .NU Domain Ltd., demanding a bigger
slice of profits and more control over the domain name. The fight
prompted a nearly three-year independent investigation launched by the
government and became the dominant issue in the island's elections
last year.
"The fact that we are making this extremely large and voluntary
commitment to Internet service on Niue is unprecedented," says Mr.
Semich from his spartan Medfield office. A small painting of a Niuean
landscape adorns one wall. He argues that what he provides is worth
more than cash. "To take that and turn it on its head and say, 'You
should pay more,' misses the whole point."
As Internet use explodes, governments around the world,
particularly in developing nations, are discovering the power of their
once-obscure country-code domain names. They have begun to see the
names as a source of revenue, a way to increase their presence in
cyberspace and as part of their national sovereignty -- like the
highway system or phone company -- to be managed as they see fit.
More than a dozen governments or quasigovernment organizations have
gained control of their country-code domain names in recent years.
Usually the names have been wrested from individuals managing them
since the 1990s -- often before the governments were aware of the
Internet.
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Source: Post-gazette.com
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