The top-level domain (TLD) “XN—ECKVDTC9D” is known as an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) TLD, which contains special character used in non-English languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, and Japanese. The “XN—” prefix indicates the usage of the Punycode encoding to represent these characters in the ASCII format that is compatible with the Domain Name System (DNS) limitations.
The domain “xn—eckvdtc9d” is a punycode representation. The unicode representation for this domain is “.ねっと,” which stands for “.net” in Japanese Katakana alphabet.
Domain naming models have undergone significant changes, allowing websites to capture more culturally specific nuances. Originally, the domain name system was designed to accommodate only a limited set of characters (A-Z, 0-9, and ‘-’). However, with the introduction of IDNs, the system now supports non-ASCII characters as a way of overcoming barriers to internet access for non-English speakers.
This shift to accommodate special characters increases the “meaningfulness” of the domain name in local scripts and improves the ease of typing for non-English languages. For example, a Japanese company that provides cloud storage might choose to use the “.ねっと” TLD to make their website more relevant and easier to find for Japanese users.
The Punycode representation allows these special characters to be encoded into ASCII format. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that oversees global domain name governance, enabled these types of domains in 2003, according to their fact sheet, “Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs)”.
ICANN further expanded the program in 2010, called the Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process, where countries and territories could apply for IDN country code TLDs (IDN ccTLDs) in non-Latin characters.
The documentation for the encoding mechanism, “RFC 3492 – Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)” by The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) provides an overview of this process.
In conclusion, the TLD “XN—ECKVDTC9D” is the ASCII-encoded version of the “.ねっと,” TLD. This use of Punycode encoding helps enhance the global accessibility of the Internet, breaking down the language barriers that once existed in domain names.
Sources:
ICANN: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/factsheets-2012-02-25-en
IETF: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3492
