Unless you’re a geography buff, you may have never heard of Tokelau, a small territory in the Pacific Ocean. No wonder. Jacob Judah explains: MIT Technology Review, Tokelau is made up of three small atolls, has a population of only about 1,400 people, and didn’t even have telephone service until 1997. But despite, or perhaps partly because of, the late adoption of technology, a strange thing happened. The tiny island of Tokelau lived on. It will become “an unlikely Internet giant,” Judah wrote. However, unbeknownst to the islanders, it becomes a center of cybercrime thanks to its .tk domain name. The story goes back to the Wild West days of the early internet in 2000 and Dutch entrepreneur Joost Zuurbier to reveal how it happened.
That year, Zuurbier signed a deal with Tokelau to manage country code top-level domains (ccTLDs, or the string that follows the URL). Tokelau didn’t have the money or know-how to do it on his own. In fact, until that agreement was reached, Tokelau officials didn’t even know they had been assigned his ccTLD, Judah wrote. Broadly speaking, Zuurbier’s plan is to make .tk websites available to everyone for free so he (and theoretically his Tokelau) can make money with advertising. It was to be. As a result, until recently, .tk domains “had more users than any other country,” he writes Judah. The problem is that almost all of them were spammers and cybercriminals. There’s no doubt that you (and almost everyone else) have come across a .tk website, even if you didn’t realize it. Tokelau state officials are now angry about the turn of events and the damage to their reputation, insisting there was no financial windfall for the territory.read Full text. (Or check out the other long formats.)