History of the Pacific Islands as British protectorate by a Resident Commissioner from 1892 to 1916 as part of the British Western Pacific Territories (BWPT), and later as part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony from 1916 to 1974. A referendum was held in December 1974 to determine whether the Gilbert Islands and Ellice Islands should each have their own administration. As a consequence of the referendum, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony ceased to exist on 1 January 1976 and the separate British colonies of Kiribati and Tuvalu came into existence. Tuvalu became fully independent within the Commonwealth on 1 October 1978. On
Proposed top-level domain ICANN published a list of proposals for top-level domain strings it had received. The following ccTLDs (Country code top-level domains) have been requested using a procedure known as Internationalized domain name (or IDN) ccTLD Fast Track Process. It is possible that some requests have been withdrawn. The following countries have national languages which use other script than Latin, but have no internationalized country code top-level domain, and none proposed in the above list: These proposals are centered on creating an independent Internet identity for linguistic and cultural communities. They are mostly inspired by the success of the .cat domain created