The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.
The proposed TLD is .INTERNAL and, as the name implies, it’s intended for internal use only. The idea is that .INTERNAL could take on the same role as the 192.168.x.x IPv4 bloc – available for internal use but never plumbed into DNS or other infrastructure that would enable it to be accessed from the open internet.
[…]
A consultation process produced 35 candidate strings, each of which was checked to ensure it wasn’t already a TLD, and for “potential for confusing similarity, for length, and for its capacity to be memorable and meaningful.” Assessments were conducted for all six United Nations languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. That process saw many candidates “deemed unsuitable due to their lack of meaningfulness.”
For example, .DOMAIN was binned because it was felt not to “convey that its purpose is specifically for private-use applications.”
After years of debate, ICANN and other internet governance orgs were left with two viable candidates: .PRIVATE and .INTERNAL.
Last Thursday, ICANN announced [PDF] that .INTERNAL was its choice.
.PRIVATE lost out because assessors felt it “may carry the unintended imputation of privacy to a higher degree, and more potential was seen for conflicting meanings across the gamut of assessed languages.”
ICANN’s board still has to sign off the creation of .INTERNAL.
[…]
Source: ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain • The Register
Well, this is a tld I know a lot of businesses have been using for decades, so it’s nice that ICANN is finally on to it. Good thing those people there are earning their money!
Robin Edgar
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