You're right about the "example.com" and similar domains always being registered...

		jcr on July 19, 2014 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Ask HN: What does traffic to example.com look like... You're right about the "example.com" and similar domains always being registered to IANA, and I even did a brain-fade on whois/nslookup in my comment, but as far as I remember, the example domains are never supposed to resolve to an IP? I'll look at this again after I get some sleep.

They used not to resolve in the far past. Apparently they decided otherwise later.