The top-level domain (TLD) “XN—FIQ228C5HS” is a Punycode represenation of the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) “.中国”, which means “.china” in English.
To understand the technical description of this TLD, first, it is important to discuss what a TLD is. A TLD or top-level domain is the last segment of a domain name. It follows the last dot in an Internet address. It is used to indicate the nature or geographical area of a website.
There are several types of TLDs managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), including country code TLDs (ccTLDs), generic TLDs (gTLDs), and infrastructure top-level domain. Here, “XN—FIQ228C5HS” belongs to ccTLDs, which is used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code.
Now, let’s look at the technical understanding of this specific TLD. This TLD seems a bit strange because it starts with “XN—”. This is due to the way that special characters in IDNs are encoded in ASCII format so that they are compatible with the DNS, which was originally designed to only understand English characters (A-Z, 0-9). This encoding process is known as Punycode, which is a way to represent Unicode with the limited character subset of ASCII used for Internet hostnames.
For instance, the TLD “.中国” has Unicode characters. When these Unicode characters are converted into Punycode, they become “XN—FIQ228C5HS”. The “XN—” prefix is a standard indicator that the characters following it are a Punycode-encoded string.
The ccTLD “.中国” (XN—FIQ228C5HS) is operated by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) as per the delegation record for .中国 from IANA. It has been available since 2010, and it shows the genuineness and legitimacy of a website in China, being of great importance for both individuals and business that are related to China.
Sources:
1. IANA — .中国 Domain Delegation Data. Retrieved from https://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt
2. Punycode and IDNA. Retrieved from https://simpledns.com/help-desk/kb.php?id=1
3. CNNIC, the operation organization of Chinese domain names. Retrieved from https://www.cnnic.cn/
4. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). (2003). 5.5 Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for IDNA. Retrieved from https://www.w3.org/TR/2003/CR-idn-20030527/Overview.html.
5. Wang, H., Liu, K., Xu, Q., Li, Q., Liu, J., & Xie, W. (2020). Research on value measurement of country code top-level domain (ccTLD) from the perspective of national image communication—Take “.cn” and “.中国” for example. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1574(1).
