A grandfathered emoji .com

♥♬.com

Love music. In two symbols. On .com.

Registered August 22, 2007, three years before the rules changed and symbols were shut out of new .com registrations. Fewer than 40 emoji .coms exist in the world. This is the only one with a heart and music notes.

Read the story

About your address bar

Seeing xn--g6ho.com?

You are in the right place. That unusual-looking address is the ASCII form, called Punycode, that the domain name system uses for ♥♬.com. Some browsers display the encoded form as a security precaution for internationalized domains. Both addresses lead to this same site.

The strange address is not the trick. It is the proof.

Nobody is meant to live at this address. It is a forwarding domain: print ♥♬.com on the billboard, the poster, the wristband, and it lands on whatever page you choose, with your own domain in the address bar. The symbols do the work in the physical world. Punycode never shows up.

The whole story in 30 seconds

A door that closed behind it.

2007

Registered

♥♬.com was created on August 22, 2007, while symbol registrations under .com were still possible.

2010

The door closed

IDNA2008, the standard .com is bound to, was published in August 2010. It allows only characters used in written language. ICANN's words: "emoji are disallowed by IDNA2008."

<40

Emoji .coms left

One published 2017 tally of the .com zone lists 233 symbol domains. Only 39 are emoji .coms, this one included, and 33 of those are a single character. A historical count, not an official registry inventory.

The result. ♥♬.com is a functioning, grandfathered .com. Under today's registration rules an equivalent new symbol-based .com cannot be created: Verisign, the .com registry, states it is compliant with the IDNA2008 standard, and ICANN's position is that emoji are disallowed by IDNA2008.

Why this pair

It does not need translation.

Heart plus music reads as love music in every language. Two marks, one idea, on the extension people trust first. It fits next to a QR code on a billboard, on a wristband, on a screen, in a Wrapped campaign.

Every emoji .com in existence

Thirty-nine. That is the whole list.

Method: the 233 symbol .coms from the 2017 zone-file scan, keeping only names made of characters on Unicode's official emoji list (©, ® and digits excluded), plus this one. Every tile links to that domain; hover for the code points.

Private acquisition

Some domains are useful. A few cannot be made again.

♥♬.com is privately held and available for a strategic acquisition.

Ownership and registration history are available for verification. Any acquisition can be completed through a mutually agreed domain escrow service.