The top-level domain (TLD) you mentioned, IM, is part of the internationalized country code TLDs (ccTLDs) issued by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). It stands for the country Isle of Man.
As per IANA, which is a department of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the purpose of the domain .im is to serve the Isle of Man internet community. As the .im top-level domain (TLD) is a country code TLD (ccTLD), it is aimed at helping to represent the culture or the language of the Isle of Man on the internet.
Let’s discuss internationalized domain names (IDNs). Internationalized domain names are web addresses that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet “a-z”. An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese.
The domain name in question, XN—9ET52U, seems to be in the format used to represent internationalized domain names (IDNs), which are encoded using Punycode. Punycode is a way to represent Unicode within the limited character subset of ASCII used for internet host names. To compare, a domain name like “münchen.de” would be encoded as “xn—mnchen-3ya.de” in Punycode.
However, the Punycode ‘XN—9ET52U’ does not appear to correspond to a valid unicode string nor a valid TLD, as per online Punycode converters. Generally, a punycode domain name begins with ‘xn—’ followed by a series of alphanumeric characters that represent a specific Unicode character string.
Therefore, while the concept of internationalized domain names tied to specific country codes and encoded via Punycode is correct, ‘XN—9ET52U’ doesn’t seem to represent a valid IDN nor a valid TLD. If you meant to provide a specific IDN TLD for a specific country or region, an error might have been present in the input.
Sources:
[1] IANA — .im Domain Delegation Data. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/im.html
[2] ICANN | IDN Program. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en
[3] Punycode – Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
[4] Punycode Converter. https://www.punycoder.com/
