This seems like a good time to educate myself about the application (and objection) process.
The bureaucracy seems precision-engineered to stultify, but apparently the public have 104 days after “String Confirmation Day” (17th Nov; capitalization theirs) to lodge objections, assuming the “GAC” doesn’t beat them to it…
…welp, hope somebody more organized (and better-funded) than I can organize an objection. Much as I feel like I’m giving up my right to gripe by assuming somebody else will come along to do the weeding.
There's a short list of grounds they will consider for an objection, and none of them are applicable here. Paraphrasing your second link, they only allow:
- "String Confusion" -- looks or sounds like an existing (approved or being applied for) gTLD. Must be filed by whoever owns (or is applying for) that gTLD.
- "Legal Rights" -- someone else owns a trademark this would violate. Must be filed by whoever's legal rights would be violated.
- "Limited Public Interest" -- the gTLD is immoral under recognized principles of international law. I have no idea when this could be applicable.
- "Community" -- An established community organization believes the group this gTLD is intended to target will object to it. This seems more like a vehicle for e.g. Little People of America to let ICANN know that ".midget" would be offensive.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to tell ICANN that .lan has been widely used and will break things in a way they will listen to.
> Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to tell ICANN that .lan has been widely used
ICANN isn't the DNS police, and lobbying them is pointless. We should campaign for open-source router projects[0], commercial hardware developers[1], DNS resolver developers, and major providers[2] to collectively designate commonly used private TLDs such as .home, .lan, .intranet, and .private as non-resolvable in public DNS.
Local resolution would continue to work, but these names would never be forwarded upstream. With sufficient adoption, we'd establish a de facto reservation and make the TLDs commercially worthless, regardless of what ICANN decides.
--
[0] There is precedence here. OpenWrt already reserves .lan in its default dnsmasq configuration.
[1] There is precedence here. GL.iNet inherits from its OpenWrt roots. Ubiquiti uses .lan as the default in its AmpliFi products. MikroTik documents it as part of its network-discovery mechanism.
[2] I'm thinking of Cloudflare, Quad9, and others.
ICANN and IANA very much are the DNS police. As a matter of fact, IANA maintains a list of special-use domains - though despite its widespread use .lan is not on the list - and these domains will get rejected from gTLD applications outright. The last thing I want is requiring each recursive resolver to have their own idea of what should and shouldn't be resolved.
On a related note, Google owns a registry (CRR) and a recursive resolver (8.8.8.8) that's commonly used by default or as fallback. Letting them ban entire TLDs would be a massive conflict of interest.
Posting because OpenWRT, possibly others as well, assign .lan names to devices on the LAN by default. People who make use of this might want to follow the application, and, if it goes through, either change the name or make sure queries can't get incorrectly get sent to upstream resolvers.
Regarding that last point, I've had issues with dnsmasq in the past where it was remotely resolving domains even when they were configured to resolve locally. For .lan domains, this could be disastrous because I often send plaintext traffic to them. I did submit a fix/workaround[0], but it's still something to look out for. If anyone knows more about this issue or other ways queries could leak, please share!
It looks like as part of the process, they delegate the prefix in global DNS and see how much traffic it currently gets; if it gets too much it will be classified as "high-risk" which at least makes things harder. Which is to say, we want as much leakage as possible to hopefully make ICANN think twice about approving this.
RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice, home.arpa was chosen apparently for reasons of beauracratic convenience rather than what would best serve existing users, who all would prefer .lan and continue to do so since that was published in 2018
- Originally, IETF specified .home, but never went through the process to add it to the list of reserved names.
- Someone applied for the .home gTLD, and while it ultimately didn't go through there was a while while it was up in the air. Due to this the homenet working group had to change gTLDs.
- They decided to switch to .homenet. However, because of DNSSEC, whatever they used would need an insecure delegation in the root zone or validating resolvers wouldn't be able to resolve it. Since IAB controls .arpa but IANNA controls the root and there was no process to ask IANNA for this, they eventually decided to use home.arpa instead.
> RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice
You may be confusing it with the IETF’s policy.
In early days of the RFCs, most started out as proposals, often but not always with some existing implementation as a jumping-off point to conversation (hence the name). I no longer remember why they started to be numbered and tracked, as the process naturally preceded that.
You can verify what I say by just reading some old ones at the rfc editor site.
- WTF is arpa? (in reality, I know, but there are better names than an obscure reference to internet prehistory)
- it is a second-level domain, why?
- 9 characters (home.arpa) is a lot
I kind of understand the motivation, it is a "technical" domain since it doesn't represent something in the global DNS registry, so it gets the .arpa TLD. However, that's reasoning that it out of touch from normal users. Normal users don't want to be exposed to the technicalities of DNS when they enter something in the address bar, and "myserver.lan" is more meaningful than "myserver.home.arpa", and giving meaningful names is the whole point of DNS.
But why is it that nowadays, it's enough for a vulture corporation to have enough money to be able to privatize a part of the "web" that is in common usage (in the sense of common good) since so long?
It should be logical even without thinking that the request have to be rejected.
If you actually think it's a trivial affair to change a well-established default with more than 20 years of history that is, on top of all other difficulties that such a change typically encompasses, used to identify and name things, I hereby beg you to never design or provide any kind of infrastructure.
This reminds me of when I used to do IT work for small businesses in college. One printing company I worked for, had about 100 computers on their network, and was using public ipv4 addresses, that they did not own, on their internal network. I forget what range they were using now. But imagine seeing a DHCP server handing out addresses like 142.250.110.1/16 on a LAN and the public ip being something totally different.
It was funny, because when I brought it up to them, it was hard to articulate why it was a problem and I couldn't convince them it was worth the effort of trying to fix. They never ran into a specific issue due to this while I was there but it felt so gross.
The problem is that they wouldn't be able to talk to any internet service that legitimately used those addresses. Whether that was likely to be a problem very much depends on whose addresses they were.
When I was working with Linux based kiosks and PoS systems I had a good share of issues with the Microsoft MVP signature use of .local on their forests. Back then their training material recommended .local for Active Directory services.
It's always hard because when you contrive possible examples of how it goes wrong, every single example sounds contrived because of course they are contrived.
Sure one day your printer might start spewing random json code meant for some microservice of the rightful IP owner.
Sure the IP's might be owned by the Air Force and one day they might start getting traffic from your pos ipad that they decide looks like an attempt to attack one of their internal secret networks...
Sure one day traffic meant to go to your printer ends up flooding and dossing a windmill controller, preventing the rightful operators from turning it the right direction during bad weather and causing $25M damage...
And of course the real failures are more like, only people from the Maldives can't send email to your email server, a failure with no impact.
There's a good reason to do this if you can't be certain what reserved subnets are used in a given network and you absolutely need a static ip for some reason.
At least that's the conclusion I've arrived at at some point, but I don't remember what was the exact use case anymore.
However there are still several global IPv4 ranges that are not local reserved ranges but are effectively reserved and you could use them if you really want to without any issues.
As former AD person and dealing with that several companies, the recommendation for internal network DNS has long been subdomain.company.com that is not on public internet.
Even today when setting up greenfield networks, I generally use internal.company.com. It also lets you get public trusted SSL certificates so you don't have to deal with internal PKI.
while .local is reserved, it's reserved for mDNS, and should be avoided on things like active directory. using an internal subdomain of a registered public domain is best practice. .internal is also okay.
Then why hasn't there been a gTLD reserved for local use? The only ones that are reserved are .local and .home.arpa. .local is out, since it is entirely for use with mDNS / Bonjour.
That leaves .home.arpa, which is very awkward and only a thing since 2018 (my home network's use of .lan definitely predates this). Especially as a non US citizen. It also seemed so far that .lan was the "unofficial" gTLD to be used, since much software like OpenWRT was already using it anyway.
Either way: making .lan internet routable seems entirely unhinged to me. LAN has always been the acronym for Local Area Network. Why would anyone sane think that it is a good idea to make this into a gTLD that can be internet routable? The only way I see forward to do this justice, is to only allow RFC 1918 and IPv6 addresses that are within the assigned prefix for your router.
This seems like a worse version of allowing .zip to be a gTLD. Remember the idea of downloading something from https://github.com/[...]@evil.zip?
> Then why hasn't there been a gTLD reserved for local use?
.qm to .qz and .xa to .xz have always been implicitly reserved as TLDs that will never be globally-routable [0] [1], but these aren't exactly the most intuitive names so it's unsurprising that nobody uses them.
(".internal" as mentioned by the sibling comment [2] is the best choice these days, but its definition is somewhat recent.)
(note: i hope .lan does not get approved, but people have to understand that they are rolling dice when using unreserved names)
edit: fucking wild that this is downvoted into negatives. press the wiki link and read the first line if you don't believe me. in fact, i will quote it: "The name internal is reserved by ICANN "
Pihole here will still serve .lan internal domains. Anyone that registers .lan globally are the ones guilty of using a culturally busy domain that was unreserved before.
In time we'll see articles like "Don't register a .lan domain if you want people to visit your site"
Eh, maybe someone spinning up a brand new environment using it in 2026 should have known better. But you don't have to go that far back to reach a point where the current list of gTLDs would make .lan feel safe.
This being on the front page at the same time as the coffee machine sending 1TB of data, and the icann application being submitted by Coffee Danger LLC is just beautiful
This being on the front page at the same time as the coffee machine sending 1TB of data, and the icann application being submitted by Coffee Danger LLC is just beautiful
I just bought mysefl a '.casa' domain, got wildcard cert for it from lets encrypt and haven't bothered with any of these. Downside, if internet goes down resolver stops, but thats why I have local NS mirror and all DNS queries go through my resolver.
You can buy a cheap domain to make sure no one else uses it and just roll it on your lan. Throw some DNS ACME challenges and you have valid certificates too.
Beside the fact that was standard or not it made sense to use .lan domain for local devices, and a lot of router sold were configured with that domain for resolving local network hosts.
To me is a very bad idea to implement this proposal, it should instead be standardized and reserved for internal usage as a fix. There were even RFC like https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6762/#appendix-G that suggested their usage for local devices in a network.
What is the point of selling the .lan domain, except for making money at the expense of a security risk for millions of networks that already use that domain for internal hosts?
BTW to me there was never any sense to add new TLD domain despite country code. They decided to render internet less secure, by giving scammers infinite TLD to register they scam domain like "apple.lan", with the sole purpose of making for them easy money.
While you're not wrong, I suspect that .lan sees more real world usage than .local
It may not be an official standard, but it does have some weight as a de-facto standard.
I've tried briefly to try and find some numbers to back that up, but can't find much beyond apple's bonjour vs consumer routers - although I've seen companies with AD domains using .lan as well. (Although, I've also seen companies using 1.0.0.0/8 for their internal addressing...)
it definitely gets used, and i hope that the application is denied, but i also hope this is another wake up call for people that pick unreserved domains.
> RFC 8375 defines the intranet domain as .home.arpa, but ICANN in 2024 says it should use .internal instead. Is ICANN not choosing .lan or .home because these two domains might still fetch a good price?
For those not in the know, Google lobbied ICANN to get the name and in their application they stated (repeatedly) that the intent was to buy it so that it could be reserved; as .dev was already used by developers and if someone bought it for commercial purposes it would harm the developer community.[0]
.... they then proceeded to start selling them.
Leading to all kinds of issues, the exact issues that they raised...
Your linked icann doc is huge, but from skimming it the top portions seem to describe google’s intent to use it themselves for hosting their own projects and services.
The .lan domain has been on an rpz blocklist along with several other commonly used names in my networks for quite some time. I have no plans for that domain to ever successfully resolve regardless of whether or not it goes live.
I've been using a single letter "fake" tld for my internal LAN DNS zone. Looks like ICANN requires 3+ letters in tld applications, so hopefully should be safe for quite a while.
Debian should apply for this so they can take advantage of case insensitivity and sans-serif fonts so to let people go to DEB.lAN to view their website
.lan is widely used (by OpenWRT and Ubiquity and likely others) by home / SMB routers, where all connected devices will automatically be assigned hostname.lan. Technically, .home.arpa and/or .internal are designated for this, but .home.arpa is pretty clunky and they're very new (.home.arpa is from 2018 and .internal from 2024). Usage of .lan for this predates either.
Why would you even want something like “lan” as a global TLD? Does it mean something else than the obvious?
Fortunately there’s no need to speculate as the application explains this clearly:
AGB Q118: What is the meaning/definition of the applied-for gTLD string?
Answer: Lan commonly refers to a broadly recognized term used across a wide range of contexts.
Man, my whole life I’ve identified with, related to, and wished to finally just be associated with “the concept represented by the applied-for string”!
The applicant appears to be an agglomeration of LLCs and legal diversions to hide responsible parties. It does lead me to assumptions about their motivations, whomever they may be.
Source: the application refers to multiple layers of LLC ownership, and the responsible parties listed are general counsels at some IP financialization company, "Identity Digital"
Every year around $4B is spent on websites. Where is the money going, who's getting rich?
It's monopolies like Verisign (of the .com tld) that have luxurious profits. No competition, plus they are allowed to raise their prices above inflation while their infrastructure costs go down every year.
This seems like a good time to educate myself about the application (and objection) process.
The bureaucracy seems precision-engineered to stultify, but apparently the public have 104 days after “String Confirmation Day” (17th Nov; capitalization theirs) to lodge objections, assuming the “GAC” doesn’t beat them to it…
https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...
…of course there’s a “filing fee,” priced in “hours of a panel of lawyers’ time,” to lodge such an objection…
https://newgtldprogram-2026-agb.icann.org/en/8-module-4-comm...
…welp, hope somebody more organized (and better-funded) than I can organize an objection. Much as I feel like I’m giving up my right to gripe by assuming somebody else will come along to do the weeding.
Following "String Confirmation Day" there's also a "Name Collision Risk Management Framework" assessment that new gTLDs will need to pass in order for the application to proceed: https://icannwiki.org/Name_Collision_Risk_Management_Framewo...
This may very well end up to be determined too risky to be delegated, like .corp, .home and .mail in 2018.
There's a short list of grounds they will consider for an objection, and none of them are applicable here. Paraphrasing your second link, they only allow:
- "String Confusion" -- looks or sounds like an existing (approved or being applied for) gTLD. Must be filed by whoever owns (or is applying for) that gTLD.
- "Legal Rights" -- someone else owns a trademark this would violate. Must be filed by whoever's legal rights would be violated.
- "Limited Public Interest" -- the gTLD is immoral under recognized principles of international law. I have no idea when this could be applicable.
- "Community" -- An established community organization believes the group this gTLD is intended to target will object to it. This seems more like a vehicle for e.g. Little People of America to let ICANN know that ".midget" would be offensive.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to tell ICANN that .lan has been widely used and will break things in a way they will listen to.
> Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to tell ICANN that .lan has been widely used
ICANN isn't the DNS police, and lobbying them is pointless. We should campaign for open-source router projects[0], commercial hardware developers[1], DNS resolver developers, and major providers[2] to collectively designate commonly used private TLDs such as .home, .lan, .intranet, and .private as non-resolvable in public DNS.
Local resolution would continue to work, but these names would never be forwarded upstream. With sufficient adoption, we'd establish a de facto reservation and make the TLDs commercially worthless, regardless of what ICANN decides.
--
[0] There is precedence here. OpenWrt already reserves .lan in its default dnsmasq configuration.
[1] There is precedence here. GL.iNet inherits from its OpenWrt roots. Ubiquiti uses .lan as the default in its AmpliFi products. MikroTik documents it as part of its network-discovery mechanism.
[2] I'm thinking of Cloudflare, Quad9, and others.
> ICANN isn't the DNS police
ICANN and IANA very much are the DNS police. As a matter of fact, IANA maintains a list of special-use domains - though despite its widespread use .lan is not on the list - and these domains will get rejected from gTLD applications outright. The last thing I want is requiring each recursive resolver to have their own idea of what should and shouldn't be resolved.
On a related note, Google owns a registry (CRR) and a recursive resolver (8.8.8.8) that's commonly used by default or as fallback. Letting them ban entire TLDs would be a massive conflict of interest.
Posting because OpenWRT, possibly others as well, assign .lan names to devices on the LAN by default. People who make use of this might want to follow the application, and, if it goes through, either change the name or make sure queries can't get incorrectly get sent to upstream resolvers.
Regarding that last point, I've had issues with dnsmasq in the past where it was remotely resolving domains even when they were configured to resolve locally. For .lan domains, this could be disastrous because I often send plaintext traffic to them. I did submit a fix/workaround[0], but it's still something to look out for. If anyone knows more about this issue or other ways queries could leak, please share!
[0]: https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/18610
It looks like as part of the process, they delegate the prefix in global DNS and see how much traffic it currently gets; if it gets too much it will be classified as "high-risk" which at least makes things harder. Which is to say, we want as much leakage as possible to hopefully make ICANN think twice about approving this.
https://icannwiki.org/Name_Collision_Risk_Management_Framewo...
RFC 8375: Special-Use Domain 'home.arpa.' is supposed to be used for this.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8375/
RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice, home.arpa was chosen apparently for reasons of beauracratic convenience rather than what would best serve existing users, who all would prefer .lan and continue to do so since that was published in 2018
I looked into the actual reasoning here:
- Originally, IETF specified .home, but never went through the process to add it to the list of reserved names.
- Someone applied for the .home gTLD, and while it ultimately didn't go through there was a while while it was up in the air. Due to this the homenet working group had to change gTLDs.
- They decided to switch to .homenet. However, because of DNSSEC, whatever they used would need an insecure delegation in the root zone or validating resolvers wouldn't be able to resolve it. Since IAB controls .arpa but IANNA controls the root and there was no process to ask IANNA for this, they eventually decided to use home.arpa instead.
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/homenet/8cfJkr7SPMaPS4...
> RFCs were originally formalization of what was being used in practice
You may be confusing it with the IETF’s policy.
In early days of the RFCs, most started out as proposals, often but not always with some existing implementation as a jumping-off point to conversation (hence the name). I no longer remember why they started to be numbered and tracked, as the process naturally preceded that.
You can verify what I say by just reading some old ones at the rfc editor site.
and most people dont use it because its an incredibly poor name.
What, exactly, makes it poor? Be specific.
I will be very specific about why it is poor. The specific reason is my home network is not the Advanced Research Projects Agency.
- WTF is arpa? (in reality, I know, but there are better names than an obscure reference to internet prehistory)
- it is a second-level domain, why?
- 9 characters (home.arpa) is a lot
I kind of understand the motivation, it is a "technical" domain since it doesn't represent something in the global DNS registry, so it gets the .arpa TLD. However, that's reasoning that it out of touch from normal users. Normal users don't want to be exposed to the technicalities of DNS when they enter something in the address bar, and "myserver.lan" is more meaningful than "myserver.home.arpa", and giving meaningful names is the whole point of DNS.
having two levels, for one. "arpa" not being remotely memorably to non-technical people, for another.
[delayed]
Why don't they just put home.arpa or .arpa in their search path?
It would be awesome if Ubiquity will actually follow this RFC too. The Amplifi product line from Ubiquity have `.lan` support but no `home.arpa`.
[0]: https://amplifi.com/
yeah I'm not going to tell my s/o to use plex.home.arpa. instead of plex.lan
But why is it that nowadays, it's enough for a vulture corporation to have enough money to be able to privatize a part of the "web" that is in common usage (in the sense of common good) since so long?
It should be logical even without thinking that the request have to be rejected.
That's nice and all, but OpenWrt (and its use of .lan) predates this particular RFC by a rough 14 years.
I hope the gTLD application gets struck down.
God forbid OpenWrt ever receives an update or something.
You know, just because it's in an RFC doesn't mean it's actually practical. 'home.arpa' is significantly worse than every other option.
An update wouldn't change all the existing configurations.
If you actually think it's a trivial affair to change a well-established default with more than 20 years of history that is, on top of all other difficulties that such a change typically encompasses, used to identify and name things, I hereby beg you to never design or provide any kind of infrastructure.
.internal as well I believe
Internal. is also an valid option. I moved everything there about a year ago
.internal is ICANN and not (yet?) an IETF RFC:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal
Other special use domains:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-use_domain_name
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain#Reserved_doma...
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6761
Looking at your links, subjective and legacy considerations aside, .alt per RFC 9476[1] seems as good a choice as .lan.
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9476
But what if my LAN is in the garage?
well then it's a home for your lan.
This reminds me of when I used to do IT work for small businesses in college. One printing company I worked for, had about 100 computers on their network, and was using public ipv4 addresses, that they did not own, on their internal network. I forget what range they were using now. But imagine seeing a DHCP server handing out addresses like 142.250.110.1/16 on a LAN and the public ip being something totally different.
It was funny, because when I brought it up to them, it was hard to articulate why it was a problem and I couldn't convince them it was worth the effort of trying to fix. They never ran into a specific issue due to this while I was there but it felt so gross.
The problem is that they wouldn't be able to talk to any internet service that legitimately used those addresses. Whether that was likely to be a problem very much depends on whose addresses they were.
In the UK, Virgin Media uses UK Ministry of Defence's 25.0.0.0/8 for CGNAT
When I was working with Linux based kiosks and PoS systems I had a good share of issues with the Microsoft MVP signature use of .local on their forests. Back then their training material recommended .local for Active Directory services.
Pretty sure MS's official documentation always strongly suggested using a real domain you own for AD.
It's always hard because when you contrive possible examples of how it goes wrong, every single example sounds contrived because of course they are contrived.
Sure one day your printer might start spewing random json code meant for some microservice of the rightful IP owner.
Sure the IP's might be owned by the Air Force and one day they might start getting traffic from your pos ipad that they decide looks like an attempt to attack one of their internal secret networks...
Sure one day traffic meant to go to your printer ends up flooding and dossing a windmill controller, preventing the rightful operators from turning it the right direction during bad weather and causing $25M damage...
And of course the real failures are more like, only people from the Maldives can't send email to your email server, a failure with no impact.
There's a good reason to do this if you can't be certain what reserved subnets are used in a given network and you absolutely need a static ip for some reason.
At least that's the conclusion I've arrived at at some point, but I don't remember what was the exact use case anymore.
However there are still several global IPv4 ranges that are not local reserved ranges but are effectively reserved and you could use them if you really want to without any issues.
.lan should just become reserved
It's a shame that ICANN did get so greedy and put everyone at risk.
Having internal domain names owned by some guy on the internet has already compromised multiple corporate networks. See the talk from this guy:
https://www.romhack.io/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Internal-D...
As former AD person and dealing with that several companies, the recommendation for internal network DNS has long been subdomain.company.com that is not on public internet.
Even today when setting up greenfield networks, I generally use internal.company.com. It also lets you get public trusted SSL certificates so you don't have to deal with internal PKI.
`.internal` and `.local` are safe and won't be used in the future. There are reserved for internal networks
while .local is reserved, it's reserved for mDNS, and should be avoided on things like active directory. using an internal subdomain of a registered public domain is best practice. .internal is also okay.
im not super keen on all of these gTLDs, but anyone choosing to use .lan should have been aware of the risks of using an unofficial/unreserved domain.
at the very least, the .dev stuff should have had people second-guessing their usage of unreserved domains.
Then why hasn't there been a gTLD reserved for local use? The only ones that are reserved are .local and .home.arpa. .local is out, since it is entirely for use with mDNS / Bonjour.
That leaves .home.arpa, which is very awkward and only a thing since 2018 (my home network's use of .lan definitely predates this). Especially as a non US citizen. It also seemed so far that .lan was the "unofficial" gTLD to be used, since much software like OpenWRT was already using it anyway.
Either way: making .lan internet routable seems entirely unhinged to me. LAN has always been the acronym for Local Area Network. Why would anyone sane think that it is a good idea to make this into a gTLD that can be internet routable? The only way I see forward to do this justice, is to only allow RFC 1918 and IPv6 addresses that are within the assigned prefix for your router.
This seems like a worse version of allowing .zip to be a gTLD. Remember the idea of downloading something from https://github.com/[...]@evil.zip?
It seems odd to ask why there isn’t a reserved option for this, then acknowledge home.arpa and immediately discard it.
Home.arpa exists, or buy a domain and use that. Or pick something that’s not reserved and run the risk of this happening.
> Then why hasn't there been a gTLD reserved for local use?
.qm to .qz and .xa to .xz have always been implicitly reserved as TLDs that will never be globally-routable [0] [1], but these aren't exactly the most intuitive names so it's unsurprising that nobody uses them.
(".internal" as mentioned by the sibling comment [2] is the best choice these days, but its definition is somewhat recent.)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2#User-assign...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012163
>Then why hasn't there been a gTLD reserved for local use?
there is. it's .internal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.internal
(note: i hope .lan does not get approved, but people have to understand that they are rolling dice when using unreserved names)
edit: fucking wild that this is downvoted into negatives. press the wiki link and read the first line if you don't believe me. in fact, i will quote it: "The name internal is reserved by ICANN "
> Introduced 29 July 2024; 2 years ago
That explains why I hadn't heard of this yet. My current incarnation of my internal network dates from ~april 2024.
Pihole here will still serve .lan internal domains. Anyone that registers .lan globally are the ones guilty of using a culturally busy domain that was unreserved before.
In time we'll see articles like "Don't register a .lan domain if you want people to visit your site"
My personal head canon is that ICANN told Google they had to open registration or someone who would open it up would get it
Eh, maybe someone spinning up a brand new environment using it in 2026 should have known better. But you don't have to go that far back to reach a point where the current list of gTLDs would make .lan feel safe.
>But you don't have to go that far back to reach a point where the current list of gTLDs would make .lan feel safe.
throughout most of my career, there was no unreserved domain that felt safe. but especially after .dev.
I guess https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6762#appendix-G should be updated
This being on the front page at the same time as the coffee machine sending 1TB of data, and the icann application being submitted by Coffee Danger LLC is just beautiful
This is a security issue for many devices. What could possibly go wrong overriding a tld used for internal networking....
This being on the front page at the same time as the coffee machine sending 1TB of data, and the icann application being submitted by Coffee Danger LLC is just beautiful
You would hope someone would finally learn after .dev and .local started getting used.
RFC 6762 reserves the .local. TLD for Multicast DNS. There are no reservations for .lan. so something like home.arpa. should be used instead.
router.home vs router.home.arpa
.home.arpa is so clunky. Why do I have to put the acronym of a US military project in my domain to access resources on my own local network?
Yes, I know that organization was central to the development of the l Internet, but it's not relevant as a domain 40 years later.
I just bought mysefl a '.casa' domain, got wildcard cert for it from lets encrypt and haven't bothered with any of these. Downside, if internet goes down resolver stops, but thats why I have local NS mirror and all DNS queries go through my resolver.
You can buy a cheap domain to make sure no one else uses it and just roll it on your lan. Throw some DNS ACME challenges and you have valid certificates too.
Why should I have to purchase something (yearly subscription, mind) in order to access something that is potentially half a meter away?
This is not how anything should work.
you dont have to. .internal is fine.
router.internal avoids the military arconym
What could go wrong using tlds that were not explicitly reserved for internal use?
Beside the fact that was standard or not it made sense to use .lan domain for local devices, and a lot of router sold were configured with that domain for resolving local network hosts.
To me is a very bad idea to implement this proposal, it should instead be standardized and reserved for internal usage as a fix. There were even RFC like https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6762/#appendix-G that suggested their usage for local devices in a network.
What is the point of selling the .lan domain, except for making money at the expense of a security risk for millions of networks that already use that domain for internal hosts?
BTW to me there was never any sense to add new TLD domain despite country code. They decided to render internet less secure, by giving scammers infinite TLD to register they scam domain like "apple.lan", with the sole purpose of making for them easy money.
This has been widely used since before there were any TLDs explicitly reserved for internal use.
not putting lan in the most recent update to the reserved private namespace was a massive miss. It is defacto a reserved private namespace.
Indeed. It akin to an application for a .local TLD.
>It akin to an application for a .local TLD.
it is not, as .local is designated as a special-use domain name and .lan is not.
While you're not wrong, I suspect that .lan sees more real world usage than .local
It may not be an official standard, but it does have some weight as a de-facto standard.
I've tried briefly to try and find some numbers to back that up, but can't find much beyond apple's bonjour vs consumer routers - although I've seen companies with AD domains using .lan as well. (Although, I've also seen companies using 1.0.0.0/8 for their internal addressing...)
it definitely gets used, and i hope that the application is denied, but i also hope this is another wake up call for people that pick unreserved domains.
This was my first thought as well. Yikes.
Full collection of proposed new gTLDs: https://newgtldprogram-aps.icann.org/statistics
Also see a .bldg application, which also might conflict with some legacy naming schemes.
> RFC 8375 defines the intranet domain as .home.arpa, but ICANN in 2024 says it should use .internal instead. Is ICANN not choosing .lan or .home because these two domains might still fetch a good price?
My tweet on Sep 26, 2026
I'm still seething about `.dev`.
For those not in the know, Google lobbied ICANN to get the name and in their application they stated (repeatedly) that the intent was to buy it so that it could be reserved; as .dev was already used by developers and if someone bought it for commercial purposes it would harm the developer community.[0]
.... they then proceeded to start selling them.
Leading to all kinds of issues, the exact issues that they raised...
https://github.com/basecamp/pow/issues/397
https://github.com/laravel/valet/issues/433
https://danielbachhuber.com/switch-laravel-valet-from-dev-to...
https://community.localwp.com/t/dev-domain-doesnt-work/4277
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2017/11/29/google_d...
[0]: https://gtldresult.icann.org/applicationstatus/applicationde...
Your linked icann doc is huge, but from skimming it the top portions seem to describe google’s intent to use it themselves for hosting their own projects and services.
Same. An I use .lan internally. I'm tilted.
Didn't know this history. Thanks for educating me.
The .lan domain has been on an rpz blocklist along with several other commonly used names in my networks for quite some time. I have no plans for that domain to ever successfully resolve regardless of whether or not it goes live.
Can I get a group of Ians and register .Ian?
You can apply for any gTLD string for any reason, the hard part is the application fee: USD$227,000.
gTLDs were a mistake. I say that as an owner of several domains with gTLDs.
There's almost no value.
Large businesses almost never use them. The potential for scams / phish / etc are now limitless.
The way they've filled out the application surprises me.
There are questions that literally say as part of the question "Choose Yes or No", so they've answered "true"...
And Q165 is fun: "Is it likely that consumers will face significant risks if domain names in the TLD(s) in the application are abused?" Answer: "No"
I've been using a single letter "fake" tld for my internal LAN DNS zone. Looks like ICANN requires 3+ letters in tld applications, so hopefully should be safe for quite a while.
If that were to ever change, I bet there's a certain billionaire who'd be very interested in the .x gTLD.
Debian should apply for this so they can take advantage of case insensitivity and sans-serif fonts so to let people go to DEB.lAN to view their website
When ICANN reserved .internal a couple years ago, I was saying they should just flip and truncate it to .lan(retni) so everyone's happy.
21 separate applications for some variation on .agent/.agentic
I'm guessing that'll end up being expensive for someone...
I'm out of the loop on this, can someone explain who this is and why this is bad?
.lan is widely used (by OpenWRT and Ubiquity and likely others) by home / SMB routers, where all connected devices will automatically be assigned hostname.lan. Technically, .home.arpa and/or .internal are designated for this, but .home.arpa is pretty clunky and they're very new (.home.arpa is from 2018 and .internal from 2024). Usage of .lan for this predates either.
Why would you even want something like “lan” as a global TLD? Does it mean something else than the obvious?
Fortunately there’s no need to speculate as the application explains this clearly:
Man, my whole life I’ve identified with, related to, and wished to finally just be associated with “the concept represented by the applied-for string”!
We need to separate competitive gTLDs from those whose registration is controlled uncompetitively. Very few, e.g. .xyz, are competitive.
ICANN have locked the name .internal for private network use. Not sure why .lan is needed.
https://www.icann.org/en/board-activities-and-meetings/mater...
.lan is shorter, and has been widely used for many years (since before .internal or .home.arpa were "standardized")
Related:
ICANN Reveals 2026 Round Applications for New Generic Top-Level Domains
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49997301
Good luck with that. We'll see who is stupid enough to buy a .lan domain and never get visitors.
..Why? Just to annoy people?
The applicant appears to be an agglomeration of LLCs and legal diversions to hide responsible parties. It does lead me to assumptions about their motivations, whomever they may be.
Source: the application refers to multiple layers of LLC ownership, and the responsible parties listed are general counsels at some IP financialization company, "Identity Digital"
To sell to scammers for lots of money
No.
so so dumb. Pure greed. This is going to cause so many issues
Every year around $4B is spent on websites. Where is the money going, who's getting rich?
It's monopolies like Verisign (of the .com tld) that have luxurious profits. No competition, plus they are allowed to raise their prices above inflation while their infrastructure costs go down every year.
"America" has our best interests at heart /s
This feels like a really weird comment on a post about gTLDs that exist in parallel to .com