The tiny Polynesian island nation of Niue is beginning to think it’s been had. Truthfully, it’s clear they didn’t do their homework before they did their exchange.

Ironically, it seems the buyer hadn’t really done his, either. Anyone who has been flooded by advertisements for ‘global domains’ can certainly understand that it’s a growing 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 aspect in that deal is that the Western Samoan government granted the rights to GDI in return for a percentage for every domain sold.

Niue’s name is consequent from the local language’s phrase 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 entrepreneur whose former station was editor for a computer magazine, Semich recognized the potential value in the marketability of unique domains. Apparently finding the ‘nu’ extension an nice-looking letter arrangement, he signed a contract with the Niue government that gave him the exclusive 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, carrying out the installation of an island-wide network 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, planned to hawk his bargain domains to Americans. He had no idea that his ideal clients were in Sweden, where ‘nu’ is the local word for ‘now.’

Obviously,’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 convincing 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 greatly swollen the coffers of his ‘.NU Domain Ltd’ to the degree that its website’s home page default language is now — or nu — in Swedish.

Furthermore, Semich has smartly 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 unique 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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