We don't own our Custom TLD domain name and that is our local domain name

I currently started working for a company that has made a boneheaded mistake and I am looking for the least painful way to correct it.

Before I started, they named their local domain using a TLD they did not register. For the purpose of this question lets just say the internal domain is called example.com.

After starting here I found we were having all sorts of DNS issues and problems with name resolution locally and externally. I would ping abc computer and usually it would return a proper 192.168.x.x address per their ip convention.

However, with growing frequency I would would notice issues where it would return an external ip address with the computer name.example.com. After messing around for a few hours I thought to myself... No, it can't be... let me just check. Well I did a whois on example.com and found that we don't own the tld, someone else owns it.

When I confronted the powers that be about this, I was pressed for a resolution and being the bad sysop I came up with:

1. don't make this mistake;


2. rename the domain and do all the work that comes with it


3. pay the oodles of money wanted for the domain that you "forgot" to register and never forget again.

I was in turn told to find another way and that there had to me more solutions than that... Unfortunately, I've never seen anyone make a noob mistake like this because well you had better own the domain you want to use.

Do you have a suggestion?