A name that will never be sold
For decades, network admins invented private TLDs — .lan, .corp, .home, .internal — and hoped none of them would ever become real. Some did: when ICANN's 2012 program opened applications, strings like .home and .corp turned out to collide with huge numbers of private networks, and ICANN decided not to delegate them.
In 2024 ICANN settled the question by reserving .internal for private use. It will never be delegated in the public DNS, so names under it can't collide with a real website. If you need certificates, you'll issue them from your own private certificate authority.
Good for
- Company intranets and internal services
- Home labs and private networks
- Any hostname that should never resolve on the public internet
Watch out for
- Public certificate authorities won't issue certificates for .internal names — use a private CA
- Don't confuse it with .local, which is for multicast DNS (mDNS)
.internal by the numbers
.internal is a special-use name, not a regular top-level domain. Its purpose: used within private networks not intended for the global Internet.
Reserved for use in situations in which private network operators may wish to use their own domain naming scheme that is not intended to be used or accessible by the global domain name system (DNS), such as within corporate or home networks.
For further information, see A Top-level Domain for Private Use (draft-davies-internal-tld)
You can't register a name under .internal at any registrar, and it's not meant to resolve on the public internet. That's exactly why it's useful: software and people can rely on it never colliding with a real website.
.internal FAQ
Can I register a .internal domain?
No. .internal is reserved and will never be delegated in the public DNS root zone. You can use it freely on your own network.
Should I use .internal or .local?
Use .internal for names served by your own DNS servers. .local is reserved for multicast DNS (Bonjour/Zeroconf) and behaves differently.
What is .internal used for?
Used within private networks not intended for the global Internet.
Sources
Data from IANA root zone version 2026102000. Last changed October 21, 2026. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.