I would argue that your statement is only true as long as the URL in question is owned by the application that sent the 301 in the first place. If a different a

I would argue that your statement is only true as long as the URL in question is owned by the application that sent the 301 in the first place. If a different application now owns the URL, then it violates least astonishment for the URL to be redirect when, from it's perspective, the redirect was never sent. At the least, a redirect should not be permanent across name server changes (when the domain changes hands). Unfortunately, this would effectively be adding state to HTTP.