Comment by lxgr

> go hit the home page of a tech megacorp (such as Microsoft or Google)

Much too big for metered data, full of ads, and importantly they all mandate HTTPS these days, which breaks my use case of forcing a captive portal on paid/login-gated Wi-Fi to render.

example.com is (unfortunately for the IATA) the almost perfect "can I reach the Internet" service: It's unlikely to go away, supports HTTP, is fairly small, easy to remember, and I don't care if a captive portal poisons my DNS cache with a fake response temporarily.