The name example is reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force

Internet Engineering Task Force

The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...

 (IETF) in RFC 2606 (June 1999) as a domain name that may not be installed as a top-level domain

Top-level domain

A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...

 in the Domain Name System

Domain name system

The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...

 (DNS) of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

Reserved DNS names

In 1999, the Internet Engineering Task Force

Internet Engineering Task Force

The Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...

 reserved the DNS labels example, invalid

.invalid

The name invalid is reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 2606 as a domain name that may not be installed as a top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet.-Reserved DNS names:...

, localhost

.localhost

The name localhost is reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 2606 as a domain name label that may not be installed as a top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet.-Reserved DNS names:...

, and test

.test

The name test is reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 2606 as a domain name that is not intended to be installed as a top-level domain in the global Domain Name System of the Internet for production use....

so that they may not be installed into the root zone

DNS root zone

A DNS root zone is the top-level DNS zone in a Domain Name System hierarchy. Most commonly it refers to the root zone of the largest global DNS, deployed for the Internet. Ultimate authority over the DNS root zone rests with the US Department of Commerce NTIA...

 of the Domain Name System.

The reasons for reservation of these top-level domain names is to reduce the likelihood of conflict and confusion. This allows the use of these names for either documentation purposes or in local testing scenarios.

Purpose

The top-level domain example is explicitly intended to be used in documentation or other technical writing, when domain names are presented as examples in usage or presentation of concepts of the Domain Name System or the Internet.

See also

• example.com
  Example.com
  Example.com, example.net, example.org, and example.edu are second-level domain names reserved for documentation purposes and examples of the use of domain names....
  
  
• 192.0.2.0/24 – IPv4
  IPv4
  Internet Protocol version 4 is the fourth revision in the development of the Internet Protocol and the first version of the protocol to be widely deployed. Together with IPv6, it is at the core of standards-based internetworking methods of the Internet...
  
   range reserved for documentation and example code by RFC 3330
• 2001:db8::/32 – IPv6
  IPv6
  Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...
  
  range reserved for documentation by RFC 3849