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January 25, 2007, 03:21 PM ET
An Obscure Domain Name Closes for Good
When the tiny archipelago of Tuvalu needed to raise some cash a few years back, it sold the rights to its most valuable commodity: its domain name. The domain -- .tv -- was, for obvious reasons, widely coveted by Web developers, and it netted the nation a good deal of cash.
Most little-used domain names are considerably less lucrative, though. Take, for example, .um -- a virtually unknown domain reserved for the United States' "minor outlying islands." The islands are uninhabited and "grouped together entirely as a statistical convenience," according to their official Web site, but they still had that domain set aside for them.
Until now, that is. The institution that maintained the domain, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, said it had lost interest in keeping .um alive, according to the Associated Press. And the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has voted to shut down the domain, noting that .um is all but unused. --Brock Read
Categories: Leadership
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