The tiny island nation of Tuvalu (population 10,588) has no arable land, its main link to the rest of civilization is a government ship that sails quarterly, and one of its few national holidays is Bomb Day, which marks the afternoon an errant Japanese missile smashed through its only church. Yet the little atoll (it sits at sea level, about half way between Hawaii and Australia) is suddenly the envy of the cyberworld.

A Pasadena, Calif., startup figures the country's Internet designation, .tv, is worth a lot of money. DotTV, funded by incubator Idealab, last week agreed to pay Tuvalu $50 million for the right to auction .tv domains for the next 10 years. Tuvalu had sold use of its domain name for a couple years. Among the domains in play on DotTV's site at press time: Kiss.tv (it's yours if you can top $7,000), Snowboarder.tv, and Sexmovies.tv. But don't think Tuvalu sells itself cheap. It just sells itself. The Australian government recently donated long-distance service to Tuvalu, but few islanders have a phone. So they put the excess bandwidth out for bid, and the phone-sex industry stepped in. You can buy a Tuvalu ambassadorship, too. An Italian man paid $22,000 to be Tuvalu's ambassador to the Vatican.