Most of the world is outside the (English-speaking) United States of America and doesn&#x27;t speak an ASCII language. That&#x27;s why Unicode exists - couldn&#x27;t we all just use it? That&#x27;s what the IRI RFC says in essence. EDIT: Perhaps I misread and you&#x27;re saying we need two layers like the RFCs intended it: the user-visible Unicode IRIs and the protocol-level ASCII URIs. cURL lives between these two and arguably would be simpler if there was no such separation and everything was Unicode to begin with.