It was from an early web entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He needed to handle Tokelau’s country-code top-level area, or ccTLD—the quick string of characters that’s tacked onto the top of a URL. 

Up till that second, Tokelau, formally a territory of New Zealand, didn’t even comprehend it had been assigned a ccTLD. “We found the .tk,” remembered Aukusitino Vitale, who on the time was common supervisor of Teletok, Tokelau’s sole telecom operator. 

Zuurbier stated “that he would pay Tokelau a sure sum of money and that Tokelau would permit the area for his use,” remembers Vitale. It was all a little bit of a shock—however hanging a cope with Zuurbier felt like a win-win for Tokelau, which lacked the sources to run its personal area. Within the mannequin pioneered by Zuurbier and his firm, now named Freenom, customers might register a free area identify for a 12 months, in change for having commercials hosted on their web sites. In the event that they needed to do away with adverts, or to maintain their web site energetic in the long run, they may pay a charge.

Within the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau grew to become an unlikely web large—however not in the way in which it could have hoped. Till not too long ago, its .tk area had extra customers than some other nation’s: a staggering 25 million. However there was and nonetheless is just one web site really from Tokelau that’s registered with the area: the web page for Teletok. Practically all of the others which have used .tk  have been spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals. 

Everybody on-line has come throughout a .tk––even when they didn’t notice it. As a result of .tk addresses have been supplied at no cost, not like most others, Tokelau shortly grew to become the unwitting host to the darkish underworld by offering a endless provide of domains that might be weaponized towards web customers. Scammers started utilizing .tk web sites to do every thing from harvesting passwords and cost info to displaying pop-up adverts or delivering malware. 

CHRISSIE ABBOTT

Many specialists say that this was inevitable. “The mannequin of giving out free domains simply doesn’t work,” says John Levine, a number one skilled on cybercrime. “Criminals will take the free ones, throw it away, and take extra free ones.” 

Tokelau, which for years was at finest solely vaguely conscious of what was happening with .tk, has ended up tarnished. In tech-savvy circles, many painted Tokelauans with the identical brush as their area’s customers or recommended that they have been incomes handsomely from the .tk catastrophe. It’s exhausting to quantify the long-term harm to Tokelau, however reputations have an outsize impact for tiny island nations, the place even a number of thousand {dollars}’ price of funding can go far. Now the territory is desperately making an attempt to shake its status as the worldwide capital of spam and to lastly clear up .tk. Its worldwide standing, and even its sovereignty, might rely on it. 

Assembly modernity

To grasp how we obtained right here, it’s a must to return to the chaotic early years of the web. Within the late ’90s, Tokelau grew to become the second-smallest place to be assigned a site by the Web Company for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, a gaggle tasked with sustaining the worldwide web.