Earlier this year, Tuvalu and Western Samoa sold to commercial third parties the exclusive rights to the suffixes .tv and .ws respectively. The .ws domain has been promoted as an abbreviation of ‘world site’. Previously, the Cocos Islands sold the .cc suffix and Tonga sold the rights to sell .to.
With ICANN introducing seven new generic TLDs next year, including .name, .biz and .info, the value of unusual country-code TLDs is expected to reduce, particularly the less obvious domains like .WS and .MU.