I personally wrote the patch that caused example.com to be invalid in accordance with the RFCs

Hi,

Hmm, which rfc are you reading? I see what you did, it goeas against rfc6761.

        - treat restricted/reserved TLDs (invalid, test, example, loca
+lhost)
          as invalid (thanks, Steve Bertrand!)


# Purpose: Check whether a top level domain is valid for a domain.
sub tld {
  my $self = shift;
  my %args = $self->_rearrange([qw( address )], \@_);
 
  unless (eval {require Net::Domain::TLD; Net::Domain::TLD->VERSION(1.
+65); 1}) {
    die "Net::Domain::TLD not available";
  }
 
  my $host = $self->_host( $args{address} or return $self->details('tl
+d') );
  my ($tld) = $host =~ m#\.(\w+)$#;
 
  my %invalid_tlds = map { $_ => 1 } qw(invalid test example localhost
+);
 
  return defined $invalid_tlds{$tld} ? 0 : Net::Domain::TLD::tld_exist
+s($tld);
}
[download]

Did you goof? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6761 says

   2.  Application software SHOULD NOT recognize example names as
       special and SHOULD use example names as they would other domain
       names.
[download]