At the height of the Internet land rush in 1998, an unusual story stood out from the rest: the tiny nation of Tuvalu sold, for $50 million, the rights to its chunk of cyberspace. Tuvalu, a string of islands halfway between Hawaii and Australia with a population of just 10,600, had rarely made world headlines. But the multimillion-dollar sale, to an ambitious Web entrepreneur in Canada, changed all that.

The story really began when Tuvalu, along with dozens of other nations and territories, was assigned its own two-letter suffix that signifies an Internet domain. Under the assignment, Britain received .uk; France, .fr; and Tuvalu, by chance, .tv.

Into this picture came Jason Chapnik, a 28-year-old entrepreneur from Toronto. Mr. Chapnik says he came up with the idea of registering names within the .tv domain as early as 1994.

''We started brainstorming,'' Mr. Chapnik recalled in a telephone interview from his home. ''If we could have dot-anything, what would we want? We made lists -- dot-info, dot-law. Once we hit on dot-tv as a concept, we knew we had it.''