Imagine if each time a British internet user entered an e-mail or website address, they would be required to include a Chinese or Cyrillic character.For millions of non-English speakers around the world, this is precisely what they experience when they use the internet as the domain name system is unable to fully accommodate their local language. Since their inception, domain names have been largely confined to ASCII text, based on a Roman character set used in the English language.
While this works well for people familiar with those characters, thousands of other language characters - from French accents to the Greek alphabet to Japanese Kanji - are not represented.
Multilingual Domain Names Stifling Internet Diversity [news.bbc.co.uk]
In my case, the only IDN I tried to promote was in English. Yes, English. Don't forget that due to the rich heritage of English we have characters such as æ and é in our dictionary - so it's not just those who use accents widely and those with completely different character sets which are affected.
My experience of promoting the name was that it was virtually impossible. Google wouldn't index it properly. Adwords wouldn't recognise it as the display URL until I had to appeal. Major modern browsers put up warnings and redirected the URL. All in all, a total mess. I gave up ... even getting natural links would have ended up in the non-IDN domain name being linked.
[icann.org...]
