The Two-Decade Fight for Two Letters on the Internet
www.nytimes.com
The South Pacific island of Niue says it was cheated out of .nu, a domain that turned out to be very lucrative on the other side of the world.

The South Pacific island of Niue is one the most remote places in the world. Its closest neighbors, Tonga and American Samoa, are hundreds of miles away. The advent of the internet promised, in a small way, to make Niue and its 2,000 or so residents more connected to the rest of the world.

In the late 1990s, an American businessman offered to hook up the island to the internet. All he wanted in exchange was the right to control the .nu suffix that Niue was assigned for its web addresses. The domain did not seem as lucrative as .tv — which was slotted to Tuvalu, another South Pacific nation — and the leaders of Niue (pronounced New-ay) signed off on the deal. But the two sides were soon at odds.

Now, after more than two decades of back and forth, the disagreement is finally nearing a resolution in a court of law. Disputes over domain names were not uncommon during the internet’s infancy but experts are hard pressed to recall one that has lasted this long.

It turned out that .nu was, in fact, very valuable. “Nu” means now in Swedish, Danish and Dutch, and thousands of Scandinavians registered websites with that suffix, creating a steady business for Niue’s business partner, Bill Semich.

Non-paywall link

  • partial_accumenEnglish
    32•7 months ago

    This is an interesting story that looks like it goes deeper. I was only able to find a few articles about it from its beginning in 1997, but it looks like there could be a good case by the Niue government if some of their claims are true. This part is the most damning, again, if its true:

    In 1997 IANA, without the approval of the Niuean Government, delegated the ccTLD for Niue to a businessman, William Semich, who lives in the United States. The advisor to the Government at that time was an ex-peace corp volunteer named Richard Saint Clair. Mr Saint Clair told the Government that the name meant nothing, that it was of no value or significance, and there was nothing that could be done. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Saint Clair then left his post as advisor and joined with Mr Semich in his organization – IUSN. The Government of Niue has been working every since to regain its ccTLD. source

    (Again, if true) So a foreigner was working for the island government, told them the TLD had no value, assisted the sale to go through, then quit the government and joined the newly formed company which now had control of the TLD. This look like most definitions of fraud.

    I don’t know anything about the site this was posted on or how trustworthy it is, so take it with a grain of salt.