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Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

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Wilya

Yeah. After the .dev disaster, you'd think people would have learned their lesson...

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I have a .dev domain and completely missed this. What happened?

Many people were using the .dev tld as some sort of local tld.

And I guess it was probably cheaper for Google to just buy the TLD and not fix their internal processes?

Well I think buying it was also to the benefit of everyone else using .dev locally. But oh well.

Not really. Suddenly, .dev is a real TLD instead of a fictional one we use for local hostnames.

Google owns the .dev TLD, and they bought it for entirely internal use. People got upset about this (any company owning a TLD for internal use only is pretty weird, and especially one as generic as ".dev") so they started to offer it to the public.

The bigger issue is that a lot of people use .dev for internal/development uses, and it should therefore never been made into a "real" TLD in the first place. It's like deciding to sell "example.com" to someone.

I registered a .dev for my company, but because it's a company of one I imagine this won't affect me then. Good to know though. I do recall using .dev for local/internal development years ago...

EDIT: so would this mean that registering a .dev for some BigCo domain could potentially cause problems? Curious what the real-world implications might be.

I don’t think there are really any implications moving forward. It only affected developers in the first place. Developers have since been forced to stop using .dev for development, thanks to the existence actual .dev domains.

Yeah, at this point the horse is out of the barn, so don't worry about registering a .dev. Any damage that would be done has already happened. The point is it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

If anyone's curious, there's a shortlist of "official" TLDs to use for local development https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606#section-2

I could've swore .local was okay, as that's what I use. But maybe not. Apparently it can cause issues with Macs, but that's new to me seeing as how I primarily develop on one.

Developers have been using <something>.dev as their localhost hostname even though the .dev TLD wasn't a designated test/reserved TLD[0]. Everyone's non-https development environments broke when Google added the TLD to HSTS preload, forcing browsers to load it in HTTPS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15268701

0: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606#section-2

I think ICANN will continue with more disasters, you just wait :)

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