It was recently pointed out that .dev while never officially sanctioned for the purpose has been used extensively as a test TLD for development servers.
Would Google entertain supporting something like .local.dev for this purpose, used only within a single organization and without reverse-lookup supported?
If not, is there a better alternative that also maintains the aesthetics as well as the similarity with production domain names?
More likely is that we'd simply launch .dev as an openly available TLD (based on inquiries it seems to be in demand). Once it's open you could follow best practices by simply buying the actual domain name you intend to use. Whether it routes on the Internet at large is entirely up to you and how you configure the nameservers.
We use real domain names for all of our dev servers on my team. They happen to be .co domain names, not our own TLDs, because of a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Would Google entertain supporting something like .local.dev for this purpose, used only within a single organization and without reverse-lookup supported?
If not, is there a better alternative that also maintains the aesthetics as well as the similarity with production domain names?