This isn't a Los Angeles domain anymore than the .TV domain is for TV stations. (FYI, it's for the island of Tuvalu, which gets a bit of revenue by letting VeriSign control its domain.)

Using this argument, I guess the .uk domain is reserved for ucky food?

Just a quickie to plug OpenNIC [unrated.net]. It's nifty, like www.yournamehere.geek. Or even create your own TLD altogeather. Someone should tell LA about this. I already emailed the mayor of Long Beach (just south of LA) but she is an idiot. Talked to her a few times, then helped another canidate with his campagne aginster her. I'm just getting off topic hre aren't I. The point being I am having a tough time getting any local govt to listen to reason to open source/alternate IT/anything not sole by a big name crop.

Drives me insane. Sorry for the rant.

The Holy See [vatican.va] (Vatican City) has its own TLD, .va, and it's a city. I think the calls that Los Angeles is the first city with a TLD are a little premature.

I wonder how they can claim that L.A. is the first city with its own TLD, when the Vatican [vatican.va], 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.

Sorry to break the news to you, but the Vatican City is a country, too.

Just like Australia is both a country and a continent.

Said Vellmont:
I find it rather sad that this gets posted as news on slashdot, given that slashdot is supposed to be run by geeks. I'd expect this from my local newspaper, but CowboyNeal should know better.

Said CowboyNeal:
Looks like an Irish firm made a deal with Laos to use the .la TLD.

I think it was fairly clear.. the submitter is the only one who used the word "officially", unless you count the headline -- and headlines are just attention-getters that are rarely factual (and usually fairly effective in their purpose).

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.

No. Holy See is it's own country [cia.gov], comprised of one city, Vatican City.

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.

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

Some background: .LA has been around for several years. Here [i-dns.net] 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.

Wait wait wait, "officially"? Isn't the .la TLD still officially assigned to Laos, and they've just cut a deal with some company to promote it as a Los Angeles TLD, just like the TLDs of Western Samoa, Tuvalu and Belize are promoted as "Web Site", "Television" and "Business" respectively? Does the City of Los Angeles even know about this?

Not only is this old news, but it's years old. This company has been registering .la TLDs with the Los Angeles spin for *years*.

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.

The Vatican is a country. It may be in the shape of a city, but it is entirely an independant entity and the smallest in the world. It's population is under a thousand, it's official language is latin, it has it's own currency, and a radio station [radiovaticana.org]. Don't know why I know all of this.

I don't know if you remember, but CmdrTaco, has day dreamed out loud about having his own TLD. He wants, ".dot".

So it would be: ech tea tea pea colon slash slash slash dot dot dot.

Having said that, what happens when the people of Laos decide they want to use their TLD?

Actually, Laos reserved a bunch of .la domains for use within the country.. com.la, net.la, mil.la, gov.la, and about 140 more.

I believe they're getting something in the range of 20% of all revenues from the domains.

Maybe they can use the money to pay for those laonix [slashdot.org] pcs..

If by "used for Tuvalu citizens" you mean "pull some money into a dirt-poor country [odci.gov] so that maybe the economy will grow and everyone can afford running water and electricity someday" -- then yes.

I just wanted to point out that DreamHost is only the technical partner running the .la registrar functions, just as Afilias is the technical partner running the .la registry.

The new company is "LANames Corporation", and they got the rights from LANIC. Apparently Sterling had never actually had the rights to register .la domains to the general public. They were only brought on to manage .la domains for Laos domestically. Laos found out what they were doing and had IANA redelegate the domain to LANIC.

The worst thing is right when Sterling knew things were finally coming to an end, they sent out an email "promotion" to existing customers to renew at dirt cheap prices (like $150 for 5 years, $200 for 10 years). They then took the money and didn't even update the whois records to reflect the renewals (at that point they didn't even have access to them).

I'd recommend trying to charge back the charges with your credit card company or sue Sterling directly to get the money back!

Guy Rosbrook - rosbrook@qwest.net: he is the COO who had been illegally running .la.

Sterling's lawyers are:

Brad Russell, Esq
McCullough Robertson
Level 12 Central Plaza Two
66 Eagle Street
Brisbane, Qld 4000
Australia
email: brussell@mccullough.com.au
Tel + 617 3233 8888
Fax + 617 3229 9949

Why are there too many? [TLDs]

For the same reason why you have directories on your hard drive. There's no reason in theory why you must have them, but a hierarchical delegation of namespace prevents unfortunate collisions. It allows grouping of files based on software packages - dare I say that the Windows scheme of \Program Files\Vendor Name\Product Name is actually pretty decent, because it has a clear delegation of authority, and only sucks because typing long names with spaces at a command line is unfun? (Cygwin saves my sanity with bash tab completion... how hard would it have been to call it \Programs, and leave the extra word out?)If every software vendor insisted on having a [/\]Product Name directory, your root directory would be a mess.

When the Internet first started out, it was a project of a USGOV agency. As soon as it became international, there was a recognition of the fact that governments like to exercise this thing called 'sovereignty' over their territories. So, in addition to the 3-letter TLDs that they started out with, they assigned 2-letter country codes so that every country on the planet could feel like it exercised sovereignty its part of the Internet.

Now, here's the tricky part... Since the government of the City (or County for that matter) of Los Angeles has no sovereignty -- no authority other than what is delegated to it by the State of California and the Constitution of the United States of America, there is no reason for there to exist a separate TLD for it.

Unless and until the court decision of Grant v Lee (look it up - it was decided at Appomatox Courthouse) is reversed and Los Angeles secedes from the Union to form a city-state, .la.ca.us is just fine. It spells out exactly the lines of authority.

It positively drives me nuts, for instance, that my state's Department of Revenue is ksrevenue.org instead of revenue.ks.us like it should be, and the main site for state info is accesskansas.org . . . ORG? Please.

And yet your personal /. link is a .net - so nifty you're trying to talk local governments into adopting it, not nifty enough to use yourself. What to make of this, I don't know.

A valid question, with a valid answer...

1. Starting your own TLD isn't quite like a domain. It is a significant commitment to that TLD and all the domains that might register in it. That is more work than I wanted to do for the sake of ego. In addition there is a ratifacation process before you can reg the TLD (to ensure it will be put to good use of name space and prevent TLD squatting)
2. I have thought of reg'ing a domain in the .geek TLD... responsibilities for that are much less. (I would only have th be responsible for the hosts and running the authoritive DNS for that) 3. An entity like the City of Long Beach would have the resources and use for a full TLD, coupled to the fact that they are trying to attract tech business away from neighboring SoCal cities it would be a good choice for them (at least I think so) and it would be a big boost for OpenNIC as well.

Mabey it would be good. Mabey not. There may be technical considerations I am not aware of or other things (non-technical) as well. It was a suggestion.

Note: My earlier reference to the mayor O'Neil being not-so-bright was not based on this matter. Rather on several other interactions I have had with her. Including her reference to the city of Long Beach as being land locked. We have (I think) the second busiest port in california and a request for suggestions to help with the cities budget problems, to which I suggested GNU/Linux, OpenOffice etc, that fell on deaf ears. As well a few financial mini-scandals involving a retirement funds and street lights.

At last we have the fact that supporting OpenNIC is going to irratate ICANN. I don't like tyrants, I thinking that ICANN is looking more and more like that.

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.

I think it would be better to say that Los Angeles is the first city that is not also its own independent country to have a TLD.

Hong Kong (.hk), Macau (.mo), both in China. And LA of course DOESN'T have a TLD, .la belongs to Laos, and it could revoke any of these at any time. The .la names just being sold by some cheesy direct marketing company, nothing "official" (in the implied sense of being endorsed by the city of LA) about it.

Luxembourg [cia.gov] is larger than a city.

Nor is Hong Kong [cia.gov]

they are small, yes, but note the other "dots" on those maps.

Uh, none of that matters in the slighest. The U.S has power lines to the upper states that are sourced from Canadian power supplies; does that make them part of Canada?

Some Easten European countries use the Euro as their official currency, even though they are not part of the European Union.

"Politically" is all that matters. Vatican City is an internationally recognised country in every way, shape and form possible.