Today a brief tour around the world of internet suffixes.

From American public media, this is marketplace tech.

I'm Lily Dramale. Since 1974, well before the onset of the modern internet, there's been an international standard

that's governed the assignment of two letter codes to every country and territory on earth.

China got CN, Brazil got BR, the US of course got US.

When the internet came along, those two letter codes

started getting used in domain names to signify where the owner of a website was

based, but it didn't take long before outside companies and organizations started using them

too.

In fact, for years now, they've sometimes been willing to pay a premium

to use certain suffixes. Journalist Amy Thorpe has been writing about the profitable domain

name marketplace for the website Rest of World. She said

there's one trait that several well-known websites have in common.

These sites use something called a domain hack which is pretty much a clever usage of a domain suffix usually

added to create an extra level of meaning to a domain by spelling out a phrase, a word or a name.

So like to start with Twitch for example,

Twitch isn't actually operating out of Tuvalu,

even though their domain name is

W.W. dot Tewe. Tewelu is an island nation in the

south Pacific that has that dot TV domain suffix.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

So Tuvalu was assigned dot TV in 1995.

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