In an increasingly online world, digitized to the extent of our own, it might come as a shock to hear that one of the biggest countries on the internet is sinking.

     Nearly anyone on the internet can recognize the .tv suffix, from twitch.tv to Vice’s motherboard.tv, to ufc.tv. The suffix is marketed through Virginia’s VeriSign to tech and streaming giants. Making the tiny little island, Tuvalu, which The Guardian calls, “no more than a speck in the Pacific Ocean,” one of the most popular domain suffixes on the internet.

     Tuvalu has an estimated 10,400 people, according to Britannica, and a significant amount of the country’s wealth comes from their .tv country-code top-level domain (ccTLD), which was assigned to them 25 years ago, on March 18, 1996. 

     In the past 25 years, the ccTLD has skyrocketed to popularity due to its massive association with television. According to NameBio, “there have been 859 reported .tv domain sales from [2012 to 2017], the top 100 of which totaled more than $1.4 billion.”

     A lucrative business, indeed, but what is a business if there is no country for .tv to support?

    The biggest challenge is climate change. Rising waters spell danger for the small atoll, and coupled with frequent droughts, the country has enough trouble trying to stay alive fiscally.

     Unlike its cousin, tourist-populated Fiji, Tuvalu has “no tour guides, tour operators or organized activities and isn’t on the cruise-ship circuit,” according to traveller.com. Restricting them from the income from tourists that helps other countries.

     “A major threat to Tuvalu’s subsistence is the degradation of both land and marine resources. Sea level rise caused by climate change is a major contributor to this degradation and loss of biodiversity and natural resources”, according to the country’s website, Timeless Tuvalu.

     The Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) has, unfortunately, already proposed a remedy, and has put it into place before, with the retirement of Yugoslavia’s ISO country code and its dissolution into Serbia’s .rs and Montenegro’s .me, says Domain Name Wire. 

     Luckily for the climate change battered Tuvalu, commercial interests will likely remain in place, everyone, including Amazon, has a stake in the island nation’s well-being, should the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) choose to retire it, as ccNSO’s policy seems to be.

       “The ccNSO policy mentions Tuvalu as an edge case. The report refers to a situation in which “Island state disappears, but interests (was: “commercial Interests” intended to keep ccTLD “alive”).” The answer: “If the code element is removed, the ccTLD is eligible for Retirement. Reason for removal is not of relevance.”

     The country needs more than just a fancy domain to keep itself afloat, it needs time, and resources that it doesn’t have. 

     At the current pace, we are destroying the planet, Tuvalu is going to disappear, and with it, may go a sizable portion of our everyday websites.