Who or what gets to say what a valid TLD is? Especially when people take advantage of their own local resolvers, they could create anything at any time.
Who or what gets to say what a valid TLD is? Especially when people take advantage of their own local resolvers, they could create anything at any time.
IANA maintains a list of TLDs in the root zone[0]. I presume browsers use this list, since it does cover all TLDs in >99% of situations.
[0]: https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
Yes but local/corporate DNS servers can use any TLD they want...
Right, but browsers don't automatically recognize those, as far as I know. If you want to visit a site with a custom TLD I believe you have to prefix it with the protocol.