I realized that I typo'd 2 instead of 3 in http://bugs.python.org/issue8387#msg216888 which makes that message confusing. Here's a restatement of my findings:

* All of the Python 3 csv examples work in Python 3 on all platforms.
* The Python 2 binary-mode csv examples work in Python 2.7 on all platforms.
* The Python 2 binary-mode csv examples error out on Windows and OSX when run under Python 3. We could do nothing to address this, or, if we determine that there's no negative impact to removing the 'b', update the examples to accommodate readers who are running Python 2 examples using Python 3 for whatever reason.

Which does bring me to the same question as @pitrou, which is what data and code cause an error for @sfinnie on Python 2. :)