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.

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kokx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

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akerl_ 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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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gucci-on-fleek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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

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john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>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 "

	▲	kokx 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

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gchamonlive 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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"

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steventhedev an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My personal head canon is that ICANN told Google they had to open registration or someone who would open it up would get it

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delecti 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	john_strinlai 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>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.