The top-level domain (TLD) “xn—vhquv” is a Punycode representation of the TLD “企业,” which means “business” in Chinese.
Punycode is a coding method used to represent Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), which contain non-ASCII characters, in the form of ASCII characters. It was created for this purpose as the Domain Name System (DNS) was primarily designed for English language use and only supports ASCII characters. This presented a problem for the increasing number of internet users around the world who speak languages that use non-ASCII characters. To rectify this, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) introduced a series of protocols, one of which is Punycode, to effectively encode these characters. This would enable them to be understood by the current DNS (source: RFC 3492).
IDNs allow internet users to navigate the web in their native language scripts. For instance, Russians can use domain names in Cyrillic, Greeks in Greek, and Chinese in Mandarin or other regional languages. The domain name “企业” can be used by people in China and other Mandarin-speaking regions to represent business-oriented web content.
As for the classification of this TLD, it falls under the category of gTLDs (generic Top-Level Domains), but it is also specifically recognized as an Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) TLD. The introduction of these IDNs has significantly expanded our capacity to create more inclusive and diverse domain names.
The domain “xn—vhquv” follows the Punycode standard, starting with “xn—” that is then followed by the specific coding for “企业”. This standardized IDN system was designed to work seamlessly with existing infrastructure, meaning that internet users do not need to change any settings or configurations to access these domain names (source: RFC 3492).
It’s important to note that these domain names must be inputted in the right application or browser that supports such a feature, as not all applications do. This is still a growing field, with continuous work being conducted to have IDN universally accepted in all applications.
Sources:
1. Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) – The Internet Engineering Task Force: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3492
2. ICANN – Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs): https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/idn-2012-02-25-en.
3. Generic top-level domain (gTLD) – Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_top-level_domain.
