ICANN has formally confirmed that the gTLD .internal will never be delegated. Its board of directors resolved earlier this week that it “reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications.” It went on to recommend “that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation […]

The post It’s official, .internal is blocked forever first appeared on Domain Incite.

Google and Amazon have publicly backed ICANN’s plan to reserve the top-level domain .internal for private behind-the-firewall uses.

ICANN picked the string “internal” as the one that it will promise to never delegate to the DNS root, allowing network administrators and software developers to confidently use it with a lower risk of data leakage should the TLD come under a registry’s control in future.

The public comment period over its choice is coming to a close tomorrow, with a generally supportive vibe coming from the 30-odd comments submitted so far.

Notably, tech giants Amazon and Google have both filed comments backing .internal, with both companies saying that they already use the TLD extensively for internal purposes (Google in its Cloud services) and that to allow it to be delegated in future would cause big problems.

Some commenters niggled that .internal is too long, and that something like .local or .lan, both already reserved, might be better. Others wondered why strings such as .corp or .home, which are already effectively banned due to the high risk of name collisions, were not chosen instead.

The post Amazon and Google among .internal TLD ban backers first appeared on Domain Incite.