The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has agreed to reserve the top-level domain .internal to correspond to the IPv4 address blocks 10.0.0.0, 172.16.0.0, and 192.168.0.0 for internal networks.
These blocks are reserved for private use by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and require that they never appear on the public Internet.
As The registry When we discovered the proposal last January, we reported that ICANN wanted something similar, but for DNS, by defining a top-level domain that would never be delegated to the global Domain Name System (DNS) root.
This would mean that the TLD could never be accessed on the open Internet – and the organization’s goal of providing a domain that could be used for internal networks without fear of conflict or confusion would be achieved.
ICANN suggested that such a domain could be useful, as some organizations had already begun to create and use their own domain names for private internal use. For example, network equipment manufacturer D-Link made the web interface of its products available on internal networks under .dlink. ICANN did not agree with this, as the organization felt that ad hoc The creation of TLDs could lead Internet users to believe that the TLDs will be used more widely – creating traffic that heavily used DNS servers must handle.
The alternative would have been to select a string for internal networks. After years of deliberation about whether this was a good idea – and which string to choose – ICANN last week decided on .internal. Future applications to register as a global TLD will not be allowed.
Interestingly, one of the objections to this idea came from Google, whose vice president and chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf wrote a document in which he revealed that the “big G” had been using the .internal extension for years.
“Google Cloud needed a private TLD to eliminate external dependencies and prevent collisions with delegated TLDs,” he wrote. “Since there was no existing name for private use, Google adopted .internal in a ad hoc Fashion.”
Cerf also revealed that “a significant number of Google Cloud customers” use .internal for enterprise applications that are “deployed at scale across multiple computing environments.”
He also wrote that Google is aware that the string is already widely used for the purposes proposed by ICANN and that the .internal TLD is already the highest-ranking undelegated top-level domain listed on ICANN’s DNS Magnitude statistics page.
ICANN acknowledged that it was not certain that eliminating .internal would improve anything, but the organization’s decision said that “it will not introduce any new security, stability or resilience issues” or make existing problems worse.
Those of you who manage internal DNS now have an approved alternative to selecting a ad hoc TLD for your network. Or you can simply create a subdomain of your existing TLD – as was possible before ICANN considered this initiative.
The inner world is at your feet. ®
