The top-level domain (TLD) XN—H2BREG3EVE refers to the Indian language Hindi (हिंदी) in Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) system. IDNs are domain names 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 (ICANN, 2010).
The IDNs were introduced due to the increasing need for making the internet more globally accessible. The internet used to be subject to significant limitations, such as only being able to recognize domain names that primarily consisted of alphanumeric Latin characters, i.e., “a-z”, “0-9”, and a hyphen “-”. As a result, the world-wide web was discriminatory against languages that did not use the Latin alphabet.
ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization responsible for coordinating the Domain Name System (DNS) initiation, introduced the IDNs to make the internet a more inclusive and accessible platform globally. The `{XN—}` prefix (or ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) prefix) is part of the Punycode transcription process that allows this wide range of Unicode characters to be translated into a form that can be recognized and processed by the established DNS.
The Punycode is an encoding system by which Unicode strings (in this case, the TLD हिंदी) can be represented using just ASCII characters, as is required by the DNS currently in use throughout the internet. Hence, the Punycode for हिंदी in the DNS is XN—H2BREG3EVE (Patrik, 2003).
This addition to the internet was a significant step in making the internet more accessible to non-English speakers or to those who prefer using their regional languages on digital platforms. It now means that people in India can access domain names in their language, Hindi. For example, it allows a Hindi news agency to have a domain name in Hindi rather than English or any other language. Thus, promoting regional language usage and bridging the digital divide.
Sources:
ICANN. (2010). Internationalized Domain Names. Retrieved from https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en
Patrik Fältström. (2003). IDNA punycode: A bootstring encoding of Unicode for IDNA. Retrieved from https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492
