The top-level domain you mentioned, XN—MGBA3A3A3EJT, is an internationalized country code top-level domain (ccTLD), as described by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), a department of ICANN that oversees IP address allocation and domain name system management. ccTLDs are specific domain extensions that are reserved for a country, sovereign state, or a dependent territory. Most of them are indeed two characters long, and in the case of the standard ASCII character set, are usually derived from country codes defined by ISO-3166.
However, what you described is an internationalized domain name (IDN) ccTLD, which allows domain names in non-Latin alphabets (Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.) to be represented in the relevant native language scripts. They are encoded using Punycode, a method defined in Internet standards documents, such as RFC 3492, which provides an ASCII-compatible encoding of Unicode strings.
Let’s take the TLD you provided, XN—MGBA3A3EJT, as an example. This is an IDN ccTLD assigned to Egypt, and it represents “مصر.” in Arabic. To ensure compatibility with the DNS, which primarily understands ASCII characters, it is represented in ASCII form as XN—MGBA3A3EJT. This ensures that the non-ASCII characters used in the original domain can still be recognized and accessed by DNS servers.
Additionally, since these domain names can be difficult to type on keyboards in certain countries, a system is used where the actual Punycode value (like XN—MGBA3A3EJT) is entered instead. Thus the domain name دردشة.مصر for instance, an Arabic domain meaning “chat.Egypt”, can be entered as XN—MGBA3A3EJT to access it.
To sum up, the TLD XN—MGBA3A3EJT is an internationalized country code TLD, part of a system that enables internet users around the world to access domain names in their native language scripts. This TLD is used for websites based in Egypt with domain names written in Arabic. For the DNS servers, XN—MGBA3A3EJT is an ASCII representation of the Arabic characters “مصر.”
Sources:
1. IANA: Root Zone Database, (https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db)
2. RFC 6592: The Null MX, (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6592)
3. ICANN: Internationalized Domain Name,(IDN) Program, (https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en)
