Perhaps we need a tld or a group of tld's which are analogous to RFC1918 addresses?
This has been brought up a couple of times, but there are some pretty big issues with it. When somebody says "like RFC1918" you also need to include "problems with RFC1918" in that scope. For example, private domain names allow for local reuse of global identifiers that collide in nasty ways. What happens with RFC1918 addresses when two orgs use the same global identifiers locally and then need to interconnect: somebody has to renumber. The same is true for .pri (or whatever) domain names, in that Cowboy Hats, Inc. and Cowboy Boots, Inc. may both setup cowboy.pri domains, when they merge they have to do a lot more work which means that any original savings (of which there are none, if any) would have been lost. Also like RFC1918, private domain names will leak out in unexpected ways causing various problems. Cache poisoning was bad enough, it would become horrific with overlapping domains. There is some (as yet unpublished) research data that says ~20% of the queries currently going to the root servers are for invalid TLDs (as setup by .private internal operators). Endorsing the use of private domains will make this much worse. The best solution -- just like with addresses -- is to use real domains. Advocating private domains causes more problems than it would solve. -- Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/