[mrunkel]

Pretty rich to call them victims.

They have benefitted from a large amount of revenue and if they wanted, they could have easily prevented foreign registrations by requiring a mailing address in the country or that the registered site has some tie to the region. Like your example of .cat.

What exactly have these countries lost?

[zinekeller]

Probably everything, except for .tv (Tuvalu) which do have a good agreement. I'm skipping on .io since it's a rabbithole, but .ly and .sh aren't runned by or on behalf of their governments, they instead are being runned by different companies. The most notorious of these is Niue's (.nu), which their government try their best to recover from a Nordic country to no avail (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nu) .