Absolutely, The top-level domain (TLD) in question: XN—BCK1B9A5DRE4C, refers to one of the multilingual TLDs in use on the internet; this specific one is reserved for websites that prefer to use the Japanese language. In the ASCII scheme that forms the basis for internet web addresses, English alphabets, numbers, and certain symbols are represented with ease; but certain other languages, that do not use the Roman script, like Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. struggle with representation.
Here, XN—BCK1B9A5DRE4C is an internationalized domain name (IDN) TLD representing “.コム”, or “.com” in Katakana, a Japanese script. It is managed by Verisign, a global provider of domain name registry services and internet infrastructure, according to information from ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
It uses a special encoding called Punycode to represent international characters to allow for the use of non-Latin character sets (Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, etc.), which are not supported by the ASCII-based DNS (Domain Name System) infrastructure. So, Punycode is essentially a bridge that allows domain names containing non-English characters to still exist within the ASCII-based system of the DNS.
For illustration, when a user in Japan wants to use the “.com” TLD but in the local Japanese script (.コム), the DNS will translate the Punycode version (xn—bck1b9a5dre4c) to the native (Japanese) version and vice versa. This helps maintain web addresses in the local character set for users around the globe, while not disrupting the global ASCII-based internet infrastructure.
The use of IDN TLDs greatly increases the internet’s accessibility around the world, by making the internet friendlier to local languages and thus, integrating the resulted TLDs as an integral part of the local internet culture.
For users who are not familiar with ASCII, this opens up new possibilities for expressing their business or personal websites in their native language, creating a more global internet community.
The ICANN and IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) closely monitors the assignment of these IDNs to ensure correct and fair usage. In 2016, they opened up for more than 1500 new top-level domains, which represented a significant expansion of the existing 22 generic top-level domains.
Sources:
1. “IDN Code Points Policy for the .COM and .NET Registries” by Verisign, https://www.verisign.com/en\_US/channel-resources/domain-registry-products/idn/idn-policy/index.xhtml
2. ICANN, https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en
3. “Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)” by The Internet Society, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3491
4. “Internationalizing Top-Level Domain Names: Another Look” by IANA, http://www.i18nguy.com/markup/idna-tld.html.
