The top-level domain (TLD) is the last part of a domain name, like .com, .org, or .net. When it comes to XN—Q9JYB4C, it forms part of an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN), a domain name that includes non-English characters.
In the case of XN—Q9JYB4C, it may seem foreign or nonsensical to the average user. However, it serves an important purpose in international internet usage. It is specifically designed to include non-latin characters, such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean, or Greek symbols, among others. This follows the Unicode standard, a standard that allows computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the world’s writing systems. This TLD is encoded in Punycode, a special encoding used to convert Unicode characters to ASCII, which is the character set that Domain Name Systems (DNS) understand.
XN—Q9JYB4C is actually a Punycode representation of the word .みんな, using Japanese scripts. In Japanese, みんな (minna) means “everyone”. It is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) managed by Google, approved by the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This TLD is targeted towards Japanese audiences, and it was meant to create a more inclusive internet, where domain names are not restricted to the Latin alphabet only.
As such, XN—Q9JYB4C forms part of a step towards a more inclusive and diverse world wide web, signifying that the internet is a place “for everyone”, regardless of language and script used. This notion is vital in an increasingly globalized world, where the internet serves millions of people who use different languages and scripts.
The shift towards Internationalized Domain Names and the Punycode translations that came with them was instrumental in creating a more inclusive and accessible internet. Before such changes, domain names were restricted to English letters, numbers, and hyphens, limiting global accessibility.
For sources, ICANN’s guidelines on IDN (https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en) were instrumental in understanding the technicalities of XN—Q9JYB4C, and Google’s registry page (https://www.google.registry/domains//みんな/) also provided information about its usage. The Unicode consortium provided valuable resources about Unicode and Punycode (http://unicode.org/reports/tr46/).
