[London, ENGLAND] dotTV, the registrar that has cornered
the market for .tv registrations, announced Monday it is
launching German, French, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, and
Chinese language Web sites.
Users in the Far East will be able to register .tv domain
names in Asian characters for Korean, Japanese, and
Chinese, while German, French, Spanish users will also be
able to register in their own languages.
Making it all possible is an agreement between dotTV and
the country of Tuvalu, the geographical location of which
sends most people hunting for the atlas. A former British
colony known as the Ellice Islands, Tuvalu is about a tenth
the size of Washington, DC, and consists of nine coral atolls
in the South Pacific, about half-way between Hawaii and Australia.
Geography is largely irrelevant in the age of the Internet,
a the .tv domain will be populated mostly by Web sites
that focus on television rather than Tuvalu.
“With the success of the multi-language home site, dotTV
continues to globally expand its brand, making the .tv home
site easily usable to Internet users around the world,”
said Lou Kerner, chief executive of dotTV.
Thomas Schulz, director of international business development
for dotTV, said the expansion into other languages besides
English demonstrated dotTV’s role in the evolution of the
Internet.
“We have experienced strong global demand for .tv domain names,
and our site translations are just the first step in helping
us communicate better with our customers around the world,”
said Schulz.
GreatDomains.com, the appraiser and marketplace for domain names,
believes the .tv top-level domain has already achieved an overall
value rating second only to .com. With this level of interest,
it is not surprising that dotTV has opened its foreign language
sites.
Meanwhile, life carries on in Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu,
much as before. Defense expenditure is zero; GNP is around
US $7.8 million, largely from fishing, tourism, copra,
coconuts and fish. As for communication: the islands’ population
of 9,991 share 108 telephones and 8 kilometers of highway.
One other statistic available on the Internet (true as of 1999)
suggests a twist of irony — namely that people in Tuvalu have
4,000 radios but not a single TV.
