I’ve also used .local but .local could imply a local neighborhood. The word itself is based on “location”. Maybe a campus could be .local but the smaller networks would be .internal
Or, maybe they want to not confuse it with link-local or unique local addresses. Though, maybe all .internal networks should be using local (private) addresses?
1F919 - Call Me Hand
https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-9.0/U90-1F900.pdf