The Country-Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) has presented the results of its 12-person Emoji Study Group, which conducted an 18-month long most ambitious and comprehensive study to date with quite sad results for emoji fans, Domain Incite reports.
Emojis are banned in gTLDs, where ICANN has to approve new Unicode tables before they can be used by registries at the second level. But this rule does not work for ccTLDs. So, some registries opened registration of domain names containing emojis. There are 15 ccTLDs — almost all of them representing small islands or low-penetration African nations — that currently permit emoji domains. But among them also is Tokelau’s national domain .TK with a great number of registered names, as well as ccTLDs of some former Soviet republics: Azerbaijan .AZ, Georgia .GE and Uzbekistan .UZ. Emoji domains are not very popular, although some of them could have gained certain popularity: for example, a domain depicting a smiling face was registered for a Coca-Cola marketing campaign.
The review is 30 pages long and explains the possible problems of using emoji domains. However, the most important one is extremely simple: the same emojis are displayed differently by different browsers, services and devices. This is clearly seen from the table, which shows the display options of the famous Grinning Face With Smiling Eyes emoji:
It is quite obvious that such inconsistencies can serve as an obstacle to visiting the websites you are looking for and could create the prerequisites for navigation failures and could mislead users.
