Computerworld - A Los Angeles-based company yesterday announced a licensing deal with the government of Laos giving it rights to market the Southeast Asian nation's .la Internet top-level domain to businesses that want to use the suffix as part of their Web site addresses.
The deal between dotLA Inc. and the Laotian government is part of a growing trend in which small nations are selling rights to their country-code domains to unofficial domain-name registries. For example, the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu earlier this year signed a similar agreement for its .tv domain with dotTV Corp., which also is headquartered in Los Angeles.
DotLA's target customers include businesses in Los Angeles, Louisiana and Latin America. Garry Donoghue, dotLA's CEO, said his company has spent about $1 million so far to develop an Internet infrastructure in Laos, which will also get a share of the revenue from companies that register URLs under the .la domain.
Michael Roberts, president and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), said the nonprofit organization that manages the Internet domain name system hasn't taken a formal position thus far on such licensing deals.
"We may at some point in the future, but we haven't," Roberts said. "[But] it is a legal operation for a country to license [its] domain. There's quite a number of them that have done it."
Harry Wolhandler, an analyst at ActivMedia Research LLC in Peterborough, N.H., called such domain licensing deals "perfectly legitimate" and said they can be a boon to poorer countries that don't have the resources to develop Internet capabilities on their own.
"I think it sounds like a decent deal for the country," he said of the agreement signed by Laos. "It's better for the Laotians to have someone with some skills come in and help them get going [on the Internet] as long as the deal is favorable ... to their country's own interests."
DotLA said it will follow ICANN's domain-name dispute resolution process to settle any conflicts between companies over URLs ending in .la. The company has opened up a pre-registration period for companies looking to lock up URLs built around trademarked names and will continue that until Jan. 2, when .la will be opened up to the public.
Licensing fees for .la domain names are $200 for the first year and $100 for each additional year of registration up to 10 years. Some 10,000 names have already been registered, said Donoghue, who added that DotLA is now pursuing similar deals with several other smallcountries.
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