The top-level domain (TLD) “XN—E1A4C” falls under the category of internationalized country code top-level domains (IDN ccTLD). Broadly speaking, TLD is the last segment of the domain name. The TLD is the letters that come after the final dot of any domain name. For instance, in the domain name www.google.com, “.com” is the TLD.
Regarding the specific case of “XN—E1A4C”, this IDN ccTLD corresponds to the country code of the European Union. Its Punycode ASCII form is `.eu` in Cyrillic script. Punycode is a special encoding used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII, which is a smaller, restricted character set. Internet infrastructure deals with ASCII in a better way than it does with Unicode, making Punycode necessary.
The Punycode is a method specified in Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) document, specifically RFC 3492. According to this document, it defines a method suitable for the representation of Unicode strings, particularly those with label separators and contextual rules, in ASCII-compatible form.
To better understand the transformation, each IDN ccTLD is encoded in Punycode and starts with the prefix “XN—”. This prefix is followed by the specific string of characters which represents the particular country or territory in ASCII format. Consequently, “XN—E1A4C” is the Punycode representation for the European Union’s IDN ccTLD in Cyrillic script.
It’s worth noting that IDN ccTLDs are important in multi-lingual countries and regions where the scripts of the national languages are not Latin-based. It allows users to access and use websites in their native languages.
These IDNs are permitted by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). ICANN is a non-profit organization that is responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of databases related to the namespaces and numerical spaces of the Internet. ICANN approved the use of IDN as a TLD, and thus, allowed non-Latin alphabets to appear in domain names.
Furthermore, this TLD is managed and maintained by EURid which is a non-profit organization appointed by the European Commission for the operation of the .eu IDN ccTLD. It is part of the EU’s goal to promote multilingualism in e-commerce and to bring the .eu closer to its users in the 27 Member States and Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.
To sum up, the top-level domain “XN—E1A4C” is the Punycode representation of the European Union’s country code. It allows for greater multilingualism and ease of use for speakers of languages using non-Latin scripts within the EU and EEA.
Sources:
1. ICANN (https://www.icann.org/)
2. IETF, RFC 3492 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492)
3. EURid (https://eurid.eu/en/about-us/focus-areas/towards-new-markets/)
