God Bless Tuvalu

I've got a new favorite country. There will always be a spot in my heart for my home (that would be the United States), but that's no match for plucky Tuvalu.

Tuvalu is basically a teeny little chain of islands somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. Technically, it's "nine coral atolls", but "coral atoll" appears to be code for "small island made of coral," so I'm going to go with "island". The "teeny" part is pretty accurate, though, since 26 square kilometers is pretty small for a country no matter what your standards are.

Let's try a therapeutic role-playing exercise. Let's say it's 1978 and you've just won your independence from England, making you the fiercely proud nation of Tuvalu. You have no exports and no minerals. You don't even have any fresh water, so you have to rely on rain-based reserves and a desalination plant the Japanese have built. Most of your citizens are engaged in fishing and something called "subsistence farming", which doesn't sound very pleasant. And you live on an island made of coral, which sounds scenic even if I don't understand how you farm on it. How do you turn these resources into wealth?

The first thing you do, it turns out, is to start issuing stamps and hope to get in on the lucrative International Philatelist market. And that's good thinking: you took your only obvious asset (the fact that you're a fully accredited country, albeit one that has to share a US ambassador with Fiji), and found a way to turn it directly into money. But there's only so far you can go on the backs of rich stamp speculators.

At this point in the story, I'd like to mention that Tuvalu is one of the countries in the world that is most interested in global warming this is because, and I'm not making this up, it's so low that the slightest rise in the Pacific Ocean could displace a significant percentage of the 10,838 people that live there. In fact, it wouldn't take much to bury Tuvalu under the waves, making it a modern-day Atlantis. I expect that means they've got all sorts of high-minded scientists and Yeti and such.

So even though you're growing fat on stamp money, you're always on the lookout for more. Because you're Tuvalu, by God, and nothing will stop you from achieving your destiny. Said destiny remains dormant until 2000, when you finally figure out a way to leverage your only other obvious asset: a slightly funny name.

You see, every country has been assigned a two-letter top-level domain on the internet. Canadian domains end in ".ca", Japanese ones end in ".jp", and so on. And Tuvalu's domain, as assigned by ISO 3166-1, is ".tv".

And apparently, some forward-thinking worker, who I'm sure has immortalized in the form of a fifty-foot high statue, thought "Hey! That's the same two-letter abbreviation as the one for the word 'television'! And domain names are in notoriously short supply, forcing new webmasters to use wacky URLs like 'montykins.com'. Perhaps people would be willing to pay for .tv addresses." And before you know it, someone is claiming that ".tv is the fresh, new, exciting web address that is taking the world by storm!"

You might be thinking that selling your country's name to people for their sick little web sites isn't a good idea. But that's because you haven't seen the size of the checks. Tuvalu signed this deal in 2000 (which history has shown to be the correct time to to sign Internet-based deals), and will score fifty million dollars over the next twelve years. Add that to the 1-900 numbers, and Tuvalu has tripled its GDP in a stroke. And that's without actually doing anything!

I tell you, that's the sort of go-getter attitude that really makes a country stand out. Some places are happy to stay in their South Pacific paradises -- I'm looking at you, Papua New Guinea -- but Tuvalu has shown that it has what it takes to "make it" in the hard-hitting world of tomorrow.

Namely, a grim willingness to sell out. Go Tuvalu!