[jerryszczerry]

It was already fixed back when domain names had to be plain ASCII.

It was West-centric, yes, but it allowed for a unique and legible ASCII identifiers. And encouraged non-ASCII languages to create a unique (or, mostly-unique) Latin representation of their scripts — which is, in general, a good thing. It encouraged unification, using ASCII as the common ground.

Allowing for Unicode characters opened a new Pandora box, creating a situation that is unsolvable — either we keep the new names, making almost every string of characters potentially ambiguous, or we return to the state where ASCII-only names are the only ones usable.

Also, differentiating between ASCII and non-ASCII names doesn't solve the thing. Imagine what if the legitimate address is already in a non-ASCII script.

[matt4077]

In what universe is ASCII "common ground"? And in what universe is a few scammers here and there "pandora's box"?

Some people in this threat seem almost eager to throw out any attempt at respecting cultures other than their own using the earliest convenient excuse.

[Dylan16807]

> In what universe is ASCII "common ground"?

Excluding EBCDIC, which has the same characters, can you name a major character set that doesn't start with a carbon copy of ASCII? Shift JIS starts with ASCII. Big5 starts with ASCII. Every code page starts with ASCII. Unicode, of course, starts with ASCII. Look at just about any (physical) keyboard for any language and it will support ASCII.