Internationalized Domain Names

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names in non-latin or extended latin languages (Russian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic, etc). Internet DNS servers are not capable of handling the characters for these languages natively, but instead use Punycode, which converts Unicode characters to ASCII.

Some DNSFilter customers outside of the USA have the need to add IDNs to their Allow list/Block list. The procedure to do this is to input the native domain name into a converter, such as Punycoder.com and then to input the punycode version into the Allow list/Block list for your policy.