A few years back, ICAAN, the company that manages name services for the Internet started supporting characters beyond the basic list of ASCII numbers and letter. This means you can buy a domain name using diacritical marks and non-latin characters. I’ve had the opportunity to use these domains professionally to support a site in Chinese and personally to use my family name. On a whim, I bought the domain ゼビウス.com which which is the Katakana way to write Xevious. I quickly learned the the limits to its utility.
In order to support all the characters of Unicode, the domain name has to be converted to regular ASCII characters. As a result, I don’t really own ゼビウス.com, but rather the domain xn--gckvbh6g.com. This domain has the special prefix “xn--” that identifies it as a non-ascii equivalent. This allows any system that needs to do a domain lookup to function as expected. That’s pretty ingenious. It’s typically hidden so no one would care. You need to know that if you are configuring a web server or routing through server logs.
When it comes to using international domains for websites, things work pretty well. Assuming your keyboard has those characters, everything just works as you would expect. Given at this was a whim purchase, I am using the domain as a vanity redirect and not as the primary functioning domain. I’m able to have TLS and all the web services you’d expect from a web domain.
Things start to break down when you try to use the domain for other services. And by other services, I mean just about everything else. Email and basic terminal command commands don’t work. It would have been pretty cool to set up an email address of something like 愛@ゼビウス.com but it wasn’t meant to be. I could send an email to 愛@xn--gckvbh6g.com and it will display properly on the receiving side while still showing the decoded version.
All of this clumsiness is actually a good thing as the potential for abuse is so high. This is because there are many unicode characters that look like ASCII characters. It would be trivial to purchase a lookalike domain and use it for phishing attacks. We already have enough trouble with that with just o’s and l’s. I understand they don’t want to make it too easy.
For me, this is a $20 a year whim. It’s kind of like the joke that you think is hilarious but no one else gets it. When it come up for renewal this summer, I’ll probably let it expire. It was an interesting learning experiment.