Patrik Fältström, a security expert from Sweden, has shared his views on why emojis should not be used in domain names.
Fältström is known for his work on standardization and development in various Internet agencies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Architecture Board, which coordinates technical development of the Internet.
In a recently published article, Patrik Fältström describes the history of the ASCII versus Unicode protocols and the different IDN papers defining the use of characters in domain names.
Emoji domains are the devil.
Patrik Fältström identifies four issues with regards to emoji domains:
- The first issue is the similarity between emojis. Many emojis look alike: think of the smileys that are only different because of the different position of the eyes or because they show the mouth open or closed, etc. One way of demonstrating the potential confusion here is to notice that different smileys are more similar on the same operating system than the same smiley on two different operating systems.
- The second issue is that it is possible to combine characters, thus, to change how these characters are rendered. For example, can three persons be joined to a group of three persons, or combined in some way? Can three animals be combined, or two dogs and a ship? Another example here is the rainbow flag, which is made by combining a white flag and a rainbow. All such combinations have the potential for confusion.
- The third issue is that some combinations can be used for modifications, like changing the skin color of a person or “thumbs up”. Exactly how to differentiate between such rendered combinations of characters makes the resulting string(s) extremely difficult to separate from each other.
For the fourth issue, along with the full analysis, head over to the article, titled “Why emojis should not be used in domain names.”
This Patrik is too old for innovation and disruption in domain names