Panic was the company Cabel Sasser worked for when he created the emoji domain 💩.la.
Sasser was a co-founder of Panic, the Portland software company known for Mac and iOS products including Transmit, Coda, and later the Playdate handheld console. On April 13, 2011, he registered 💩.la and described it as “The World's First Emoji Domain.” The address is stored internally as a Punycode domain because the Domain Name System traditionally handles ASCII-compatible labels rather than the emoji character itself.
Emoji domains are a form of internationalized domain name (IDN). A browser converts the visible emoji into an ASCII representation such as xn--ls8h.la before looking it up. This makes the address technically usable while allowing a visually memorable form for users. The story is sometimes confused with the earlier history of emoji domains: other emoji-containing domains had been registered before 2011, but Sasser's site popularized the claim that 💩.la was the first emoji domain.
The .la ending is Laos's country-code top-level domain, though it has also been marketed for Los Angeles-related names. Cloudflare announced support for emoji domains in 2023.