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These are some of the doain names I type in most regularly, including on rubbish on-screen appliance keybaords. So I feel brevity wasn't given enough weight in this decision. .internal is at best marginally better on that measure than the already existing .home.arpa, and far short of what's available.
I favour (and use) .lan, but would switch to anything up to about 4 characters. There is some benefit to standards on their own merit after all. I will not be switching to .internal.