If the SSL module followed the pattern of encoding all str to bytes at the edges while leaving bytes alone, and used exclusively bytes internally (and in this case by "bytes" I mean "bytes objects containing A-labels"), then it would at least fix this bug and also make it possible for library authors to implement their own IDNA handling. Right now if you pass in a pre-encoded byte-string, exactly what ssl.py needs to compare to the certificate, then ssl.py will convert it *back* to text :-(.