The domain did not seem as lucrative as .tv — which was slotted to Tuvalu, another South Pacific nation — and the leaders of Niue (pronounced New-ay) signed off on the deal.
Niue, an oval-shaped coral island of about 100 square miles of area, about the size of Lincoln, Neb., felt it had been cheated out of a reliable stream of cash that would have helped it reduce its reliance on tourism and foreign aid.
It had also rented out its international dialing code, until Niue’s deeply Christian residents started being awakened at midnight by wayward phone sex calls from Japan.
“We are victims of digital colonialism,” Prime Minister Dalton Tagelagi of Niue said over a crackling video link from his office in the capital of Alofi.
Critics question that assessment, as there is formally no such thing as sovereignty in cyberspace, only administrative zones that divide the web into domains like .nu and, for instance, the .nz suffix assigned to New Zealand.
A yearslong procedural battle that went all the way to Sweden’s Supreme Court followed until its legal system decided to hear Niue’s case.
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