.INTERNAL is now reserved for private-use applications

Um... no? .intern is not a valid TLD; you can't get any domains with it, nobody has proposed that TLD, and if someone did that issue would be discovered then.

If you've got a couple hundred grant laying about, you could probably set up a shell company and acquire .intern through a several-year ccTLD acquisition process.

I'd like to think people learned from .dev and such. I doubt any scammer will be able to use it.

Sorry, what happened with .dev?

EDIT: just saw your comment about Google here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41205394

People were using .dev for internal things and acted surprised when Google decided to use it on the internet.

To expand on my comment: Google bought .dev and started selling domains. In truth, developers probably only noticed because Google pre-loaded their .dev TLD into HSTS, which meant that any domain ending in .dev, even if it's a local one or one you own, must communicate over HTTPS if you want a browser to interact with it.

As a result, even if you bought steves-laptop.dev for yourself, you still wouldn't be able to run an HTTP dev environment on it, you'd need to set up HTTPS. I think that was probably a good move by Google, because otherwise it could've taken weeks for most devs to notice.

I think you're referring to the new gTLD process, which yes, costs a small boatload. Those aren't, and .intern isn't, a ccTLD, nor do I believe there is a means of acquiring a ccTLD (…outside of somehow becoming a country, I guess).

You're right, I meant gTLD. Unfortunately I can't edit my comment anymore.

I think ccTLDs are restricted to two letter codes even if the country of Internia were to be be founded. The only exceptions I can think of are the localized names (.台湾 and 中国 for countries like Taiwan and China) which are technically encoded as .xn--kprw13d and .xn--fiqs8s. Pakistan's پاکستان. is the first ccTLD I've seen that's more than two visual characters when rendered (with the added bonus of being right-to-left to make URL rendering a tad more complex) so for Internia to claim .intern as a ccTLD, they'd probably need a special script.

At present, you need money and a time machine. New TLDs were allocated in batches, and there's no current application process.