A company wants its internal MCP servers, reachable only inside its own network, listed in the official registry so its developers can discover them in one place. Assess the plan.

The principle — Eligibility rules for a public index are about who can reach the thing, not about how well described it is.

Why the key is correct — The registry states its scope in its own name and then draws the line explicitly. The MCP Registry is the official centralized metadata repository for publicly accessible MCP servers. And: the MCP Registry does not support private servers. It even defines the term — private servers are those that are only accessible to a narrow set of users — with a server on an internal network given as the example. The company's servers meet that description exactly. The intended path is not a variation on the public listing but a separate one: hosting an internal registry, which can implement the same interface so that existing host applications work against it.

Why the others are wrong — Accurate metadata and namespace verification are necessary rather than sufficient. No private flag is on offer. And publishing a private-network server publicly does not make it publicly accessible; it makes the listing point at something nobody outside can reach.

Remember this — Public registry, publicly reachable servers. Everything else needs a registry of your own. That is a better outcome than it first sounds: an internal registry implementing the same interface gives the company the single discovery surface it wanted, without publishing the existence and addressing of its internal systems to everyone else in the ecosystem. The eligibility rule is doing the company a favour it did not ask for.

Sources — MCP first-party documentation.