Crown Prince Tupuoto'a is spearheading the tiny nation's technological transformation and driving changes that could amount to a complete reinvention of the kingdom's economy. Already the Oxford-educated prince has begun funneling revenues from domain registrations into an Internet-based distance learning program -- opening the doors to education and career possibilities that were previously inaccessible to the islanders. And now Tupuoto'a, who personally greets visitors to Tonga's tourism Web site, plans a wireless cable system to bring faster Net access to the islands.

While the prince himself doesn't give interviews, Emeline Tuita, Tonga's Consul General in the United States, says, "His Royal Highness has high aspirations for his people." The prince would love to turn the tide that has long kept the country dependent on agriculture and swept as many as one-third of Tonga's 150,000 inhabitants abroad in their search for better education and career options. Citing Tonga's historic independent-mindedness -- it is the only South Pacific nation never to have been colonized-- Tuita says, "I think because Tonga always wants to be different from everybody else, what they'd really like is to be the technology hub of the South Pacific."

Because of the kingdom's size, rapid transformation is a realistic possibility. "If you have 100,000 people scattered over about 260 square miles of land, you can cause revolutionary changes to happen in your kingdom awfully darn fast," says Eric Gullichsen, a co-founder and director of Tonic (Tonga Network Information Service) Corp., which runs the .to domain-name registry.

He should know; he pretty much single-handedly put Tonga on the Internet in 1995. During a prolonged visit to the islands, the American software engineer got a hankering for his e-mail, so, with the prince's blessing, he set up a few computers running a dialup connection to a server belonging to his Sausalito, Calif., startup. Gullichsen registered the top-level domain .to in the name of "Government of the Kingdom of Tonga, H.R.H. Crown Prince Tupuoto'a," using Tonga's San Francisco consulate as a contact address. And for the next couple of years, e-mail flowed peacefully between Sausalito and the Tongan capital of Nuku'alofa, without anyone giving it much thought.

But in 1997, as speculation abounded that the United States' hoard of .com domain names would eventually run dry, Gullichsen and a former engineering colleague, Eric Lyons, got to thinking. At that point, there were just under 1 million .com domains registered -- but people were concerned about the dearth of available names and were circulating proposals to create more top-level domains, like .store and .school. Fortuitously, says Lyons, the prince was visiting California that spring, "and we said, 'You know, it seems like this real estate could be useful.'"

The prince, who is the majority owner of Tonic Corp., agreed. Gullichsen says that while the Concise Oxford Dictionary includes 140,000 words, ".com has 3 million names. You have to think they're getting contrived and long -- and having an easy-to-remember name is important currency." Taking advantage of all the available words in the .to domain seemed a perfect money-making opportunity. "I mean, Mamma_Mia's_Pizzeria_#23.com -- it's hard for people to remember," says Gullichsen. "But pizza.to might still be available." (In fact, it's not, though the domain seems to have little to do with pizza.)

So in late 1997, Tonic Corp. opened its domain registry to international customers. (Tonga, by the way, is not the only Pacific island state to capitalize on a catchy domain; Tuvalu has a similar program to sell registrations on its .tv domain.) Aside from a stringent anti-spam policy, Tonic places no restrictions on content and has encouraged people around the world to share its relatively untouched name supply. To date it has registered about 15,000 .to domains at a charge of $100 for the first two years.

Some, like burri.to and toma.to, are content-free, and others, such as to.to and kyo.to, advertise willingness to sell their names for high prices. But there are companies taking advantage of .to's easy-to-remember aspect -- for example, www.forgot.to is in the process of beta-testing an e-mail-address-for-life service. V3 Redirect Services, operating at www.jump.to, www.come.to and other .to addresses, has an advertising-supported business model and offers catchy Web addresses free of charge. A quick-moving fellow on Tripod has already staked out www.listen.to/me to list his favorite radio stations and come.to/pizza brings you to the site of a pizzeria in Poland.

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