THE .TV DOMAIN NAME & THE STORY OF THE INTERNET

Actually, Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet. But we (the United States) did. The predecessor was something called the ARPANET, the concept for which was devised by one J.C.R. Licklider who was hired by the U.S. military to interconnect their main computers at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, which was the command center for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Strategic Air Command headquarters, and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. His successor, Robert Taylor, took the ARPANET live in 1969 connecting the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Center. By 1981, there were 213 hosts on the ARPANET and two years later it adopted the TCP/IP protocol, which is used by the Internet to specify how data should be packetized, addressed, transmitted, routed and received at the destination. That same year, the military portion of ARPANET was broken off and became MILNET.  However, because the other side of the ARPANET was government funded, it was limited to non-commercial uses. The final restrictions on carrying commercial traffic ended in 1995 when the National Science Foundation ended its sponsorship of a major part of the Internet backbone, which was initially created to link researchers to the Foundation’s funded supercomputing centers.

Meanwhile, back in 1984 the ARPA-Internet and the DARPA research community set up domains, which were described as administrative entities for the new networks. The idea was that in the future most of the top level names would be very general categories like “government”, “education”, or “commercial”.  The motivation is to provide an organization name that was free of undesirable semantics. Note that now .XXX is a domain name. Hence, .GOV, .EDU, .COM, .ORG and .MIL were formed. The following year the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which was initially formed under a U.S. Defense Department contract and later operated under a U.S. Department of Commerce contract, established country code top level domains. The first three were .US, .UK and .IL (for Israel). Other country code domains followed. Some countries require that the users of the domain have a local presence, such as .CA (Canada) or .DE (Germany.) Others are open to anyone.

One country whose domain name is open to anyone is the country of Tuvalu. Located midway between Hawaii and Australia, it has a population of just under 11,000, has a land mass of 10 square miles and consists of three reef islands and six atolls. 10% of Tuvalu’s total government revenue comes from royalties generated from the right to sell its country code top level domain name .TV, which, because it is an abbreviation for television, has become popular to denote the on-line video outlets of various brands. Late last month, Amazon announced that it would pay over a billion dollars for a website that streams people playing video games. The website is called TWITCH and the address is TWITCH.TV. Want to watch major league baseball games live on your mobile device; subscribe to MLB.TV. Want to view extreme slip and sliding; there’s REDBULL.TV.

So as online video becomes more popular, subscribers of .TV websites help support the inhabitants of Tuvalu and can feel a little less guilty as climate change threatens to engulf that country whose highest point is 15 feet above sea level.

About ERIC WACHSPRESS

The material on this website is for informational purposes only. It should not be considered legal advice and is not intended to create an attorney-client relationship. If you have questions regarding any material presented herein, we recommend that you consult an attorney. This web site and information presented herein were designed in accordance with Illinois law. Any content in conflict with the laws or ethical code of attorney conduct of any other jurisdiction is unintentional and void. I am a Chicago attorney practicing in the areas of trademark, copyright and information technology law as well as general corporate law. Formerly a trademark examining attorney with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, I have been in private practice since 1987 representing clients in a wide variety of industries, including the consumer products, financial services, information technology and entertainment industries. You can contact me at markscounsel@gmail.com, by phone at 773.934.5855 or by mail at 417 S. Jefferson St., #304, Chicago, IL 60607 USA
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