Comment by kokx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kokx | Hacker News Reader

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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.)

[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

Cool! Also .aa and .zz based on the table from your Wikipedia link.

>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 "

The only ones rolling dice here is anyone attempting to use the .lan TLD for public services, given that OpenWrt (and by extension most GL.iNet products) will not publicly resolve .lan under their default configuration.

> 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.

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.

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