‘I collect the names and make sure the servers are running…and spend the rest of the time fixing my boat’: Tech entrepreneurs, Tonga, and the lucrative scheme to shake up the world wide web
With the rise of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s, two entrepreneurs took advantage of the situation to sell domains cheaply while others paid incredible sums.
The .to domain, the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of the Kingdom of Tonga, a small island nestled in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, became a popular reference for many businesses during this era.
With the domain wars in full swing in 1997, Gullichsen and Lyons asked the crown prince for permission to begin selling domain names under the country’s ccTLD.
It’s safe to say that the program took off, leading to an increase in enrollment. All you needed was a valid credit card and $100 and you had staked your claim to a small piece of the booming web.
“I collect the names and make sure the servers are running,” Lyons said. Time“and I spend the rest of the time repairing my boat.”
Domains are a different beast today
Nearly 30 years after Gullichsen and Lyons’ adventure, the Web is a completely different beast. At the time of the .to adventure, there were just over a million websites, but in just a few years, that number exploded.
Figures from September 2025 show that there are around 1.2 billion websites worldwide, with around 175 websites created every minute.
Creating a website has never been easier. Web users now have a wealth of site building tools and platforms at their disposal, many of which require just a few clicks to create a working website.
Estates, meanwhile, are just as accessible and inexpensive – a far cry from the Wild West gold rush of the late 1990s.
