IANA Says Example.com's Animated Redesign Is About Bandwidth, Not Looks

IANA changed example.com in the last week of September to a bare page plus a separate JavaScript file, and told a Google developer relations engineer the reason was bandwidth. Kim Davies, IANA's vice president, wrote that "most of the traffic to the site is automated" and "tends not to fetch the Javascript file".

The reply was published on Sept. 30 by Oliver Dunk, a Developer Relations Engineer at Google, who had asked why the page changed. It is the first explanation from IANA, and it sets up a dispute over whether the new page is simpler.

What changed on example.com

DebugBear dated the redesign to Sept. 28. The page now cycles a message through English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish, the six official UN languages, rotating every 5 seconds. Each character sits in its own span with a staggered CSS transition delay, and an SVG book icon is added by script.

IANA's own description, as Davies gave it: "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". The theory is that a monitoring script fetching the HTML never downloads the script, so it never pays for the animation.

The size argument

A Lobsters thread on the email put the current response at 713 bytes of HTML plus 2.15 kB of JavaScript. Commenters proposed about 274 bytes of plain HTML with one link to the documentation. Those figures come from commenters measuring the page, not from IANA.

Date	Change to example.com	Source
Oct. 9, 2025	Card design dropped, HTML minified	DebugBear
Dec. 17, 2025	Server headers show Cloudflare	DebugBear
June 9, 2026	Empty favicon tag added to stop extra requests	DebugBear
Sept. 28, 2026	Multilingual JavaScript redesign	DebugBear

The October and June rows both trim bytes or requests, which fits Davies's account. The September row is the first in the list that adds visible behaviour.

What the new page does to users

Lobsters commenters said the per-character spans make the text unselectable and that the 5-second rotation makes the page hard to read if you look away. That is a usability cost for people copying a domain name from the page, and it has nothing to do with the automated traffic IANA wants to deter.

The page also carries a warning, which DebugBear quotes as "avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes". Wikipedia's example.com entry says the notice now reads that the site "is not a service and should not be relied on for testing or monitoring". A Lobsters commenter traced the wording to 2015 ("use this domain in examples without prior coordination") and 2020 ("use in illustrative examples in documents"), with the operational-use warnings arriving in late 2025.

The part nobody has measured

Davies gave no traffic figures. Nothing fetched for this story says how many requests example.com receives, how much of it is automated, or how many bytes the change saves. DebugBear's own uptime data says the server occasionally fails to respond correctly, which supports IANA's point that the domain is a poor connectivity check.

According to Wikipedia's example.com entry, the site launched on Jan. 1, 1999, and RFC 2606 reserved the name in June 1999. For anyone who writes documentation, nothing changes. For another piece of developer infrastructure that changed this autumn, see our report on Rust 1.99. For anyone running a health check against it, the 2025 warning and the 2026 redesign make the same point twice. A default change with a similar split between maintainers and users is Git 3's move to SHA-256, where the argument is also over who bears the cost. The next thing to watch is whether IANA publishes request numbers.