The top-level domain (TLD) you mentioned, XN—I1B6B1A6A2E, is an Internationalized Country Code Top-Level Domain (IDN ccTLD) representing India in the Hindi language in the DNS system. This is part of the Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) system, a way to display domain names made of non-Latin characters in the DNS, which only supports ASCII characters.
Internationalized Domain Names was a concept driven by the need for diversity in internet usage. The number of internet users worldwide has significantly grown and diversified. There are more non-native English speakers using the internet, and this calls for domain names that echoed their languages. And so, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) introduced the IDN framework to allow the use of a broader range of characters in domain names.
Following the W3C’s introduction of the IDN framework, many different scripts became accessible for use in domain names. They include but are not limited to Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari (where Hindi is derived), Greek, Latin, etc. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), organizations that oversee internet addresses system, manage these scripts.
Prior to this, standard domain names were limited to the 26 letters in the English alphabet, numbers 0 to 9, and a hyphen. Now, domain names could reflect the various languages of internet users around the globe. This was a significant change because it reduced the linguistic barriers on the internet.
For the TLD xn—i1b6b1a6a2e, which represents India in the Hindi language, would be entered in the address bar as .भारत. It was officially delegated to the National Internet Exchange of India by ICANN in 2014. This TLD, along with eleven other IDN ccTLDs representing India in various scripts of languages spoken in the region, gave India the distinction of being the first nation to have TLDs in 12 different scripts of its local languages.
To convert the Unicode Text to an DNS-compatible ASCII format like XN—I1B6B1A6A2E, an encoding called Punycode is used, which is defined by RFC 3492. The Punycode algorithm uniquely and reversibly transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string.
In conclusion, the top-level domain (TLD) xn—i1b6b1a6a2e is an example of an internationalized domain name. It allows international users to access the internet in their native languages, fostering diversity and accessibility.
References:
1. ICANN’s IDN Program: (https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en)
2. ICANN’s announcement of IDN TLD for India: (https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2014-08-22-en)
3. RFC 3492 – Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) – Faltstrom, P., Hoffman, P., Costello, A., 2003. (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3492)
