Public Comment is a vital part of our multistakeholder model. It provides a mechanism for stakeholders to have their opinions and recommendations formally and publicly documented. It is an opportunity for the ICANN community to effect change and improve policies and operations.
The BC appreciates the opportunity to provide the following comment regarding the Proposed Top-Level Domain String for Private Use.
The BC has reviewed SAC113: SSAC Advisory on Private-Use TLDs which recommends that the ICANN Board ensure a string is identified and reserved at the top level for private use. And specifically, that .INTERNAL be reserved to serve this purpose.
The BC notes that some of its members currently use .INTERNAL in the manner described in SAC113 as a way to reduce external dependencies and prevent collisions with delegated TLDs (see Section 2.1 Use-Cases for Private-Use TLDs of SAC113). Due to the lack of an existing private-use name being identified, some have opted to make use of the descriptive .INTERNAL, as evidenced the string’s listing as a very highly used undelegated string in ICANN DNS Magnitude statistics page. Given this current behavior, failure to properly reserve this specific string could lead to widespread consequences to myriad users.
For these reasons, the BC agrees with IANA’s determination that “.INTERNAL” meets the criteria outlined in Section 4.1 of the SSAC documentation and supports the selection of this string for private use reservation.
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This comment was drafted by Crystal Ondo and approved in accord with our Charter.