I wonder if this is a factor in why large tech organizations like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft etc have been so keen to register their own TLDs. Now they only depend on root NS and their own infrastructure, and not _any_ ccTLD provider.
Source: I'm the tech lead of Google Registry.
Don't forget, .google is far from the only closed TLD we have, too.
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?
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.
Will also note that Amazon is a registrar but relies (as others do) on markmonitor.com to be the registrar for their own domain .com name. Ditto for google which is also a registrar. So they could be the registrar for their own .com domain but choose not to do so.