[rphln]

It is probably already too late to put this in practice, as it is a breaking change, but...

Wouldn't applying Unicode normalization on domains solve this issue? For example, if a site attempts to send me to “ápple.com”, my user-agent would send me to the correct domain. Domains in Japanese, for example, would still work just fine.

Ideally, this would be handled at the DNS spec level (“no two domains shall map to the same normalized form”), but that would be even more “too late” to change.

[imglorp]

This could be done at the client level using some normalization plus a bit of reputation.

"Did you intend to go to “ápple.com” (suspected malware host), or “apple.com” (100b visitors a year)?