# Who has the rights to a name? Laos or L.A.?


![](http://www.appliedlanguage.com/flags_of_the_world/medium_flag_of_laos.gif)This
ia weird little story, that I don’t know all the details of. I am just
researching an essay about Laos, a country I visited twice in the past.
(Reading the history is very useful, and makes me realize that many of
the judgments and assumptions I made about the country when I was there,
were quite wrong). Either way, I have been telling my friends that Laos
is so small and “underdeveloped” that it doesn’t even have a university.
I thought I’d check, and it turns out I am wrong, it does have the Lao
National University. It’s webcode ends in .la, and I thought: that’s
neat, let me remember that. (I always like to know the countrycodes of
different countries). Then, out of curiosity, I did a search for the .la
country code on Google
([site:.la](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A.la+laos&btnG=Search&num=50&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en)),
and to my surprise most of the sites that come up are of Los Angeles
sites.

This doesn’t entirely throw me off, as I am used to certain
micro-nations (no offence, Laos) having their internet domain used by
others, especially I think it is Vanatua which has .nu, it is highly
popular in Sweden where nu means now. However, what really took me by
surprise is the site [www.la](http://www.la/index_html.php), which
proclaims to be “the place to buy an .la address” and states that “Los
Angeles is the first city in the world to have its own official address
- .la”. Laos is not mentioned by a word. So was I wrong in assuming that
.la is Laos’ domain name? Did some crafty Laotians just piggytail on the
L.A. address space? Well, both [the Lao foreign
ministry](http://www.mofa.gov.la), and [the Lao national
university](http://www.nuol.edu.la) have .la domain names, so…?

Stian