The tiny Polynesian island nation of Niue is beginning to think it’s been had. Candidly, it’s clear they didn’t do their research before they did their agreement.
Ironically, it seems the buyer hadn’t really done his, either. Anyone who has been swamped by advertisements for ‘global domains’ can easily understand that it’s a burgeoning business. The specter of purchasing a domain at a much better price than the more common ‘dot com’ or ‘dot net’ or ‘dot org’ is most attractive to most would-be entrepeneurs on restricted budgets. This niche’s market leader is most likely Global Domains International (GDI), which has no doubt put Western Samoa on the mental map of many a cybernaut. The key element in that deal is that the Western Samoan government granted the rights to GDI in return for a royalty for every domain sold.
Niue’s name is derived from the local language’s expression for, “Look, a coconut!” It seems they should have used theirs more carefully before signing a domain deal with Bill Semich in 1998.
An American businessman whose former station was editor for a computer magazine, Semich recognized the potential value in the marketability of rare domains. Apparently finding the ‘nu’ extension an appealing letter arrangement, he signed a contract with the Niue government that gave him the private rights to it.
It wasn’t a one-way deal. Semich assured free wireless access for all 2000 of Niue’s people and he delivered, completing the installation of an island-wide set-up of translator towers in 2003. The country’s leaders surely felt they had provided their population with a service for the new century which would favorably ensconce their place in island history.
Semich, meanwhile, intended to hawk his bargain domains to Americans. He had no idea that his ideal customers were in Sweden, where ‘nu’ is the local word for ‘now.’
Apparently,’now’ is a hot marketing action term in any language, so Semich was pleasantly surprised to find the Swedes flocking to his cyber-property. As a translated example of why this works for them, ‘drive.now’ (which would be ‘köra.nu’) is a very persuasive sales slogan which becomes an ideal URL for a Swedish driving school. To date, Semich has had 110,000 sales of ‘dot nu’ domains at $30 a year, which has considerably swollen the coffers of his ‘.NU Domain Ltd’ to the point that its website’s home page default language is now — or nu — in Swedish.
Actually, Semich has cunningly taken advantage of this windfall to become the first domain provider to incorporate a complete Unicode character set into its scripts, allowing users whose alphabets have distinctive characters — in Swedish, that would be the letters ‘å,’ ‘ä’ and ‘ö’ — to remain true to their language instead of settling for Anglicized versions, which often destroy their original meaning.
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