.localhost is already reserved for the loopback, per RFC 2606, but I agree with you in general. A small network shouldn’t have to have a $10-15/year fee to be compliant if they don’t want to use a domain outside their network.
As other posters have mentioned, .lan .home .corp and such are so widely used that ICANN can’t even sell them without causing a technical nightmare.
People who do not wish to buy a GTLD can use home.arpa as it is already reserved. If you are at the point of setting up your own DNS but cannot afford $15 a year AND cannot use home.arpa I’d be questioning purchasing decisions. Hell, you can always use sub-domains in home.arpa if you need multiple unique namespaces in a single private network.
Basically, if you’re a business in a developed country or maybe developing country, you can afford the domain and would probably spend more money on IT hours working around using non-GTLDs than $15 a year.
come on, setting up your own DNS is not difficult at all. For my home network, it’s running in a Raspberry Pi, but before that I ran it locally on my desktop. There’s no way I’d spend 15$ a year to resolve internal addresses.
Sure, you have to be careful with the TLD you choose, but I believe that if the ICANN were to create the .lan TLD, it would be all over the internet first.
Buying your own domain often includes DNS hosting but that’s not really the point unless all you’re doing is exclusively running an externally-facing website or e-mail. The main reason for buying a domain online is so everybody else recognises you control that namespace. As a bonus, it means you can get globally-cognised SSL certificates which means you no longer have you manage your own CA and add it’s root to all the devices which wish to access your services securely. It’s also worth noting that you cannot rely on external DNS servers for entries that point to private IPs, because some DNS servers block that.
