Besides u/ipython's comment that Unicode did not exist when DNS was designed, consider too that Punycode is not the problem here. The problem here is the surfe

Besides u/ipython's comment that Unicode did not exist when DNS was designed, consider too that Punycode is not the problem here. The problem here is the surfeit of homographs (similar looking glyphs w/ different codepoints and semantics) in Unicode. Punycode is not the issue. IDNA itself is not the issue either. Punycode is complexity, for sure, and it could perhaps have been avoided by just decreeing that non-ASCII labels are UTF-8 on the wire in DNS. This was considered, and you can imagine the lengthy threads that that topic produced then and still occasionally produces now at the IETF!