IANA's email about why example.com changed
I emailed IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) earlier today to ask about the new content on example.com. To my surprise, their VP replied. Here is the email:
I am happy to try and answer any questions you have.
The changes we make to the site from time-to-time are usually informed by a desire to either reduce the overall bandwidth demands of serving the site, or improve its utility. At its heart it is a placeholder for a site no-one should be accessing, but we have historically showed a message there to inform visitors about why the domain is registered and how they may use it.
As it tends to be heavily trafficked, the overall bandwidth is a key consideration, and to that end one of the changes we made this week was to split the page content into a more basic page, augmented by a separate Javascript file with additional content beyond that. Since most of the traffic to the site is automated it tends not to fetch the Javascript file, reducing overall data requirements.
The fundamental purpose of the domain is for use in documentation, such as illustrative examples you may find in instructions. We know that people may, for example, cut-and-paste a sample configuration file and forget to customize entries that contain an example domain, and we expect we get some incidental traffic from that. However, the domain isn't intended to be a general purpose endpoint for things like availability testing so we do not encourage that kind of usage. There is no requirement there is a HTTP service present on the host in order to fulfill its purpose, we just operate it as a courtesy.
Hope this is helpful. Let us know if you have any questions. You're free to use and recirculate this information as you see fit.
Kim Davies
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority