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Comment by ncpa-cpl | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure about best buy, but I've seen companies that use a TLD for their internal dns.

Like: server.nyc.company

Maybe they want to make sure the domain is under their control, and it may be cheaper just to buy the entire gtld than to change every internal domain name.

With so many laptops and byod, I've seen some issues happen when the external and internal domain names resolve differently.

Like when the internal domain.corp overlaps with the public domain.corp owned by somebody else.

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You can kinda fudge it though. Like, I don't think too many people are going to fork out the money to buy and operate the .bestbuy TLD other than ... Best Buy. So if they wanted to have it just for internal stuff, they didn't really need to own the TLD.

What's even more perplexing is that they own bestbuy.com - which is IMO more desirable than any dot-bestbuy domain for public-facing stuff.

Coming next year: bestbuy.bestbuy

https://com.com

Dunno. It may be a defensive IP thing where it’s cheaper to spend $300k on the TLD than to litigate domain name versus TLD against someone who sets up cars.bestbuy and shoes.bestbuy and stuff.

Does Best Buy’s trademark for retail extend to all categories? Maybe? But consider that booking.com spent millions and took years to get the Supreme Court to decide that “booking.com” is trademarkable, where “booking” is not.

The more I think about that the more I think I’d make the same decision.

This makes sense; $200k is only what, a 0.01% of their weekly ad spend, and we're talking about it here so. . . That combined with defensive squatting, makes business sense to me, also probably fulfilled some VP's pet project

Well, Google as well.

List of TLDs: https://ntldstats.com/registry/Charleston-Road-Registry-Inc

*.goog certificates (a bunch of [x].cloud.goog stuff ) https://crt.sh/?CN=%25.goog&exclude=expired&match=LIKE (page wil take a long time to load)

Anyone can use any word they want as a TLD on their local network. No need to register it on the public Internet.

Just set up a zone in your local DNS and you’re done.

In fact I could even use .bestbuy as a TLD on my own network. The fact that they registered it publicly doesn’t stop anyone from doing this.

That's true but best practice is to own the public one too. I'm pretty sure Microsoft recommends owning the domains you use for Active Directory, and not using anything that isn't it can't be made public

Some companies uses bare hostnames for internal systems. Those same companies use HTTP Basic auth to log into those systems. And some routers have weird behaviour for DNS resolution, like prioritising .net as the default TLD.

I ran into a situation where, even on VPN, going to https://<company>vacation/ on my home network would take me to https://<company>vacation.net (a valid domain). It would have been trivial for the owner of that domain to phish for credentials.

I had an issue with an old Access Point whose DHCP server set up the local domain suffix as accespointbrand.com, with no way to change it from GUI nor config file.

Unfortunately the AP manufacturer didn’t renew the domain and it was squatted by an ad serving website.

Every hare domain became subdomain.accesspointbrand.com

So now and then I would get those ads when using wifi. I ended up changing the Access point.

I think they used to recommend using .local as the TLD for internal stuff. Not sure if that is a good idea or if you are shooting yourself in the foot these days with if you plan on using AAD.

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