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Originally Posted by touchring (quoting a linked article)
The New Zealand government has come under fire for spending $1 million of tax-payers money on buying the domain NewZealand.com from previous owners Virtual Countries. That's one million New Zealand dollars, but it still equates to a healthy £350,000.
The figure only came to light this week following an angry parliamentary question by MP Rodney Hide.
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Actually the figure came to light earlier than the parliament debate...some time after the legal losses in the bid for newzealand.com, I was whoising this domain name and I noticed a recent change of ownership to a New Zealand government entity (from the previous Virtual Countries Inc. ownership).
I passed this info on to an astute reporter friend at Television New Zealand, along with some background info on domain names, and she investigated it and broke the news in a scoop on TVNZ.
IMO that was money well-spent for New Zealand, which now has an excellent website at newzealand.com (to which they also direct their country-reserved domain newzealand.travel to).