.INTERNAL is now reserved for private-use applications

My biggest frustration with .internal is that it requires a private certificate authority. Lots of organizations struggle to fully set up trust for the private CA on all internal systems. When you add BYOD or contractor systems, it's a mess.

Using a publicly valid domain offers a number of benefits, like being able to use a free public CA like Lets Encrypt. Every machine will trust your internal certificates out of the box, so there is minimal toil.

Last year I built getlocalcert [1] as a free way to automate this approach. It allows you to register a subdomain, publish TXT records for ACME DNS certificate validation, and use your own internal DNS server for all private use.

[1] https://www.getlocalcert.net/

It would be impossible for .internal domains to be publicly CAed, because they're non-unique; the whole point of .internal domains is that, just like private-use IP space, anyone can reuse the same .internal DNS names within their own organization.

X.509 trust just doesn't work if multiple entities can get a cert for the same CN under the same root-of-trust, as then one of the issuees can impersonate the other.

If public issuers would sign .internal certs, then presuming you have access to a random org's intranet, you could MITM any machine in that org by first setting up your own intranet with its own DNS, creating .internal records in it, getting a public issuer to issue certs for those domains, and then using those certs to impersonate the .internal servers in the org-intranet you're trying to attack.