Wednesday, January 31st 2024
ICANN Wants to Create .Internal Top-level Domain for Private Use
The nonprofit organisation that is in charge of coordinating and managing the namespaces and numerical spaces on the internet—ICANN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number—has proposed a rather big change on how consumers and businesses could be accessing networked devices on their private networks in the future. ICANN has put forward a new top-level domain for private use, much like the 192.168.x.x IP address range is allocated to private networks (alongside two other ranges), we might end up with a similar top-level domain. The proposed domain will be .internal, although we already have .localhost and .local today, but neither is really usable in a private network.
As such .internal has been suggested—in favour of.private due to concerns about it sounding like something privacy related—as a means for less computer savvy users to connect to devices on a private network. We've already seen solutions from several router manufacturers that use various domain names or subdomains to enable easier connectivity to routers. However, the goal here is to avoid clashes with top-level domains on the internet and.internal is said to resolve this problem. That said, it's not clear how this will be implemented as yet, but the ICANN is set to release more details in the near future. Even though it might not be the perfect solution, it should hopefully allow people to remember what they called their devices when they need to access them, rather than trying to remember the correct IP address.
Sources:
ICANN (PDF), via The Register
As such .internal has been suggested—in favour of.private due to concerns about it sounding like something privacy related—as a means for less computer savvy users to connect to devices on a private network. We've already seen solutions from several router manufacturers that use various domain names or subdomains to enable easier connectivity to routers. However, the goal here is to avoid clashes with top-level domains on the internet and.internal is said to resolve this problem. That said, it's not clear how this will be implemented as yet, but the ICANN is set to release more details in the near future. Even though it might not be the perfect solution, it should hopefully allow people to remember what they called their devices when they need to access them, rather than trying to remember the correct IP address.
11 Comments on ICANN Wants to Create .Internal Top-level Domain for Private Use
oh my....what have they done now.....:roll:..:eek:..:cry:
split horizon DNS is a bad and frowned upon practice so we try to minimize it as much as possible.
.local and .localhost have there own issues because they mean different things to different OSs and can be handled differently depending on platform.
to get around this most places use there TLD and rely on AD or heavily modified DNS servers to redirect users internal user requests to systems. This becomes a problem when you need to make modifications internally to DNS or want to test addresses from “the outside”.
this is a good thing for IT because it will alleviate internal DNS complexity and it will get around the .local and .localhost oddities introduced by various OSs.
without DNS then internal resources are relegated to ip address’ .
I wonder if this .internal would create that as well..
We have enough problems just getting extremely aggressive bots to stfu now we are encouraging a new era phishing nightmare? Yeah no, bottle it.