[1] As of February 6, 2025,[update] the domain has not been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), though an Internet-Draft describing the TLD has been submitted.
[3] Later, in 2017, an Internet-Draft draft-wkumari-dnsop-internal-00 proposed reserving the use of .internal for "names which do not have meaning in the global context but do have meaning in a context internal to their network", and for which the RFC 6761 reserved names are semantically inappropriate.
[4] On January 24, 2024, ICANN opened submissions for public comment on a proposed top-level domain reserved for "private-use and internal network applications".
On July 29, 2024, ICANN formally accepted and reserved .internal for private-use applications.
It identified the risk of choosing unassigned TLDs that could "later appear in the global DNS thereby causing name collisions and undefined behavior for users.