The island of Tuvalu got lucky when they were assigned the two letter country code “tv”. When internet domain names became a thing over 20 years ago they were naturally given the .tv domain extension and, as we all know, that has been used for many a video or TV based business.
The domain registry has been operated by Verisign for years under a contract with the government of Tuvalu. Basically Verisign paid Tuvalu for the right to run and sell .tv domain names and Tuvalu got a nice bit of cash in return.
However for the last few months there had been rumours that the government of Tuvalu were seriously looking at changing the contract terms and replacing Verisign with a different operator entirely.
Apparently an open tender process was conducted by the Tuvalu government and GoDaddy Registry won the tender.
I suspect we’ll hear a formal announcement about it in the next couple of days.
The switch to GoDaddy registry will mean that all existing domain names will need to move platforms at some point. Fortunately these domain registry migrations have become increasingly common over the last number of years, though that does not mean that they are always smooth.
