Oh I don't think Daniel was asking why we're doing i18n. My remark was not at him, at all. I was just pre-empting a possible made up objection. He's in fact correct to wonder why punycode decoding ended up in OpenSSL, as the rest of that section explores. The point being that OpenSSL could do its job and still support i18n domains and emails without having to ever decode punycode if only the spec had made different tradeoffs.