It was possible it was banned in 2011 by the cabforum.
It was deemed that it would more likely be exploited for malicious purposes rather than anything else, and since you cannot explicitly validate the ownership of local domains it pretty much creates a FCFS environment which can fail very easily due to the inability to validate domain existence.<p>Internal sub domains e.g local.mycorp.com are still valid as long as you can provide proof of ownership of the parent domain, and after the &quot;ban&quot; they also introduces some leniency in getting an intermediate singing cert for internal domains because in many cases the reason why a company would buy a &quot;CA&quot; cert for an internal domain &#x2F; host was regulatory and auditors don&#x27;t care what the cabforum has to say.<p>Those CA&#x27;s however will not be distributed outside of the organization so they pretty much provide as much assurance as an internal self signed CA just with the ability to please an auditor by saying that it was signed by verisign.