This seems like a good time to educate myself about the application (and objection) process.
The bureaucracy seems precision-engineered to stultify, but apparently the public have 104 days after “String Confirmation Day” (17th Nov; capitalization theirs) to lodge objections, assuming the “GAC” doesn’t beat them to it…
…welp, hope somebody more organized (and better-funded) than I can organize an objection. Much as I feel like I’m giving up my right to gripe by assuming somebody else will come along to do the weeding.
There's a short list of grounds they will consider for an objection, and none of them are applicable here. Paraphrasing your second link, they only allow:
- "String Confusion" -- looks or sounds like an existing (approved or being applied for) gTLD. Must be filed by whoever owns (or is applying for) that gTLD.
- "Legal Rights" -- someone else owns a trademark this would violate. Must be filed by whoever's legal rights would be violated.
- "Limited Public Interest" -- the gTLD is immoral under recognized principles of international law. I have no idea when this could be applicable.
- "Community" -- An established community organization believes the group this gTLD is intended to target will object to it. This seems more like a vehicle for e.g. Little People of America to let ICANN know that ".midget" would be offensive.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to tell ICANN that .lan has been widely used and will break things in a way they will listen to.
> 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 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 only have enforcement power over registries and registrars. They have no enforcement power over hardware vendors, software vendors or public resolvers.
What I implied (but failed to emphasise) is that what I'm calling for is already in de-facto effect, with multiple software and hardware vendors treating .lan as not publicly resolvable. What you describe as "the last thing [you] want" is already happening; my proposal is for more of the same.
It is valid to note that ICANN could abuse their contractual arrangements with resolvers who also operate registrars, but this would be an illegal intimidation tactic. It would not be a conflict of interest for Google to act if part of a wider campaign involving other parties.
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.
ICANN are the registry police, not the resolver police. I am proposing that resolvers wield their influence, not registries/registrars.
Formal objections require standing, procedural compliance and fees. Demanding monetary payment in order to issue an objection means that ICANN not acting as a responsible party in my view.
On the other hand we could end up in a much worse situation where Google and Cloudflare effectively control the evolution of DNS just like Google has wrangled control of web strandards from W3C.
As someone who believes that Chrome is a slow-moving coup, turning the open Web into the Chrome Platform, I'm sympathetic to that perspective. But I'm also unmoved by unspecific slippery slope arguments. This isn't wrangling control, it's enforcing the status quo. It's an absolute gimmie.
The most valuable parties to sway wouldn't even be Google or Cloudflare. As registrars as well as resolvers, I've no serious expectation that they'd stick their neck out. Ubiquiti might though.
The bureaucracy seems precision-engineered to stultify, but apparently the public have 104 days after “String Confirmation Day” (17th Nov; capitalization theirs) to lodge objections, assuming the “GAC” doesn’t beat them to it…
https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round...
…of course there’s a “filing fee,” priced in “hours of a panel of lawyers’ time,” to lodge such an objection…
https://newgtldprogram-2026-agb.icann.org/en/8-module-4-comm...
…welp, hope somebody more organized (and better-funded) than I can organize an objection. Much as I feel like I’m giving up my right to gripe by assuming somebody else will come along to do the weeding.