The domain name you have mentioned, xn—qcka1pmc, is an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) which refers to the Top-Level Domain (TLD) for Google in the Japanese language. It’s the Punycode encoded version of “グーグル”, which is “Google” in Japanese characters. Punycode helps to represent Unicode within the limited character subset of ASCII used for internet host names.
Punycode is a way of encoding Unicode characters into ASCII, which contains only the English Alphabet, numbers, and a few other symbols. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) first specified this system in one of its infamous “RFCs”, no. 3492 to be precise.
The process of registering a domain name is as follows: when a person registers a domain name, they do this through a domain registrar. The domain registrar manages the reservation of Internet domain names. So, when you search for “Google” in Japan, your browser will view “google” as “xn—qcka1pmc”, hence ensuring that the link “www.グーグル.jp” works.
The Japanese use the characters of their own language, like many countries, in the URLs. The domain name system (DNS), however, which does the work of converting domain names (like google.com) into IP addresses that computers can understand, wasn’t initially designed to handle non-English characters. This is where IDNs come in, to allow domains to be registered in other languages.
Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) and UDRP Rules handle the disputes for such domain names. For example, in a 2017 case, Google Inc. was the complainant against a registration of the domain name – xn—qcka1pmc.xyz – that the respondent, Hu Yanlin of Shanghai, China, had registered. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Dispute Resolution, decided in favor of Google Inc., and Hu Yanlin’s domain name was transferred to Google.
To summarize, .com is one of the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), and .jp is a country code top-level domain (ccTLD). For international companies or organizations, representing their brand in foreign languages helps local internet users recognize their brand easily. Thus, registering a domain name with IDNs benefit both the companies and the users.
References:
1. RFC 3492 (Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)) – https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3492
2. Case No. D2017-1521 – https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case=D2017-1521
3. About Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) – https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en
4. IETF Language Tag Registry – https://www.iana.org/assignments/language-subtag-registry/language-subtag-registry
