Los Angeles Gets Own TLD

DM420 writes "On June 9th, Los Angeles officially becomes the world's first city to have its own Internet domain.Great to hear since one day I hope to be an owner of my own TLD and this is a step in the right direction. ;) The registry is located at www.la and further details at DMnews.com" Looks like an Irish firm made a deal with Laos to use the .la TLD. Looks to be on the pricier side of domains, though.

Comments

Not the first city after all

[worst_name_ever]

I wonder how they can claim that L.A. is the first city with its own TLD, when the Vatican, which is a city as well as a country, has had its own TLD for a few years now...

Now, "First city with a TLD and drive-through breast augmentation" - that I would believe.

Recently Registered

[sabNetwork]

Hahaha this is a great feature. Check out the type of domains that are already being taken.

TRASH: 16
(including porn, hair-transplant, breast/penis enlargement, lasik surgery, and other spam)
CORPORATE: 37
(companies such as FOX trying to reserve their trademarks under every TLD possible)
DICTIONARY/GENERIC: 28
(dictionary words and other obvious domain name real estate such as "1.la")
OTHER: 137
(names that I didn't recognize or didn't fit into these categories)

Wow, I have too much time on my hands.

Definitely not the first city

[jsse]

Los Angeles officially becomes the world's first city to have its own Internet domain

What about .hk? Hong Kong is a city of China(before that HK is a British colony city) and has its own TLD for years.

.LA is a SCAM.

[SlashChick]

Oh, man. .LA domains. Where do I begin?

Some background: .LA has been around for several years. Here is one of the initial announcements, dated February 2001.

I have a client who bought one of the initial .LA domain names. He paid $150 to the then-registrar of .LA domains for 5 years of service.

Last December, he got a notice stating that the contract between Laos (the official holder of .LA) and the domain registration company had expired. The letter said, in part, "On 11 December 2002 ICANN announced its decision to re-delegate the ccTLD .la to the Lao Government, specifically the Lao National Internet Committee (LANIC). DotLA and Sterling were not aware that this change was being contemplated by ICANN or IANA, and we were not contacted by ICANN/IANA for our comments either before or after ICANN made its decision."

The letter goes on to explain that ICANN changed the official name servers for .LA to an as-yet-unnamed company. My client's domain name continued to work, but he knew he was borrowing time.

Suddenly, Dreamhost (the current .LA registrar) waltzed in and paid a handsome sum of money to become the official .LA registrar. Of course, they chose not to honor my client's 5-year registration, and demanded that he pay MORE money or have his domain name cease to work.

This has been a frustrating 6 months. My client has since registered a .biz domain, which is controlled by ICANN and not by any specific company. This means that there is no "official" registrar for .biz domains, and that there aren't going to be any disputes over who owns the TLD.

After the $150 that has been wasted by my client for a "5-year" registration, what's to say that Dreamhost won't also get into a dispute and dump .LA completely? At that point, all current .LA domain name holders would be in the same position as my client -- forced to change their web address because the company can't get it together, and losing money in the process.

.LA is a mess. I would not recommend registering a .LA domain until the whole mess stabilizes a bit.

Re:Holy see, Batman!

[Phroggy]

Ahh, but ICANN didn't assign .va to Vatican City, the IANA did! It's a ccTLD, not a gTLD, and was assigned before ICANN existed (ICANN was created in 1998; the .va TLD was assigned in 1995). And yes, it would have been news, in 1995.

Other city TLDs

[1u3hr]

If ICANN had assigned a TLD to a city, THAT would be news.

Singapore .sg
Monaco .mc
Hong Kong .hk
Macau .mo
Gibraltar .gi
Kuwait .kw
Vatican .va
Luxembourg .lu
Saint Helena .sh

Of these, most are indpendent city-states (or village-states), except for HK and Macau, which were European colonies and are now Chinese ones, Saint Helena, and Gibraltar, British colonies.