The tiny country of Niue has taken one of Sweden's biggest internet organisations to court, claiming its internet domain name was taken over without consent.

Here are the key passages from the article:

The nation's Premier, Toke Talagi, said Niue had missed out on millions of dollars' worth of revenue because of a complicated licensing agreement over the domain.

"We clearly, on our part, we were clueless to what the value of those things were at the time … the internet services were limited, they were slow, they were pretty much useless."

The "we" in question is the government of Niue. Basically, they didn't understand the value of what they were signing over. The implication is that the IUSN Foundation ("Internet Users Society – Niue") took advantage of the Niue government's naiveté 20 years ago, before the significance of the internet and domain names was fully understood by people outside the IT industry. It's interesting that IUSN's sole income comes from selling .nu domains.

I suppose it's sort of like a mining company telling local farmers they'll buy their land and promising to get rid of those pesky yellow rocks for them...