> Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to tell ICANN that .lan has been widely used

ICANN isn't the DNS police, and lobbying them is pointless. We should campaign for open-source router projects[0], commercial hardware developers[1], DNS resolver developers, and major providers[2] to collectively designate commonly used private TLDs such as .home, .lan, .intranet, and .private as non-resolvable in public DNS.

Local resolution would continue to work, but these names would never be forwarded upstream. With sufficient adoption, we'd establish a de facto reservation and make the TLDs commercially worthless, regardless of what ICANN decides.

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[0] There is precedence here. OpenWrt already reserves .lan in its default dnsmasq configuration.

[1] There is precedence here. GL.iNet inherits from its OpenWrt roots. Ubiquiti uses .lan as the default in its AmpliFi products. MikroTik documents it as part of its network-discovery mechanism.

[2] I'm thinking of Cloudflare, Quad9, and others.

> ICANN isn't the DNS police

ICANN and IANA very much are the DNS police. As a matter of fact, IANA maintains a list of special-use domains - though, despite its widespread use, .lan is not on the list - and these domains will get rejected from gTLD applications outright. The last thing I want is to require each recursive resolver to have their own idea of what should and shouldn't be resolved.

On a related note, Google owns a registry (CRR) and a recursive resolver (8.8.8.8) that's commonly used by default or as fallback. Letting them ban entire TLDs would be a massive conflict of interest.

ICANN _are_ the DNS police? They author DNS RFCs, they manage namespace delegation.

Community groups can make their own competing DNS hierarchy and governing body and perhaps should but I don't think saying ICANN aren't responsible here is reasonable.