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As Brett points out, VGRS starts resolving IDN's effective today - sort of. What they are in fact doing is providing responses instead of error messages to certain types of queries for a specific protocol. Translation: They are sort of providing IDN in the DNS for web-only traffic. It’s a hack of roughly the same complexity as the search function built-in to IE or the former Realnames implementation. While there are obvious technical differences between these three approaches, they are all based in and around the same cruft. I don't like this - resolution needs to work across the entire protocol-space, or it doesn't really resolve much now does it. Effective today, this is no longer true in a hugely broken and irresponsible way. Please mark this on your calendar as the day that internet marketers officially won out over internet technologists. The loser here is, again, the internet user. There is a better solution here that no one is talking about. Take IDNs away from the gTLD-space and allow them to be run along cultural/national lines a la the ccTLDs. My naïve understanding of the technology leads me to believe that this is the only way that we can avoid the technical, economic and political pitfalls that have plagued the development and rollout of IDN technology since it was first conceived. I'll describe more later tonight - in the meantime, I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out a) what I'm getting at and b) whether or not ICANN would have the chutzpah to make it happen. Hint: This is largely a social solution that is currently being dealt with, inappropriately, by the IETF. Of course, the IETF is increasingly dealing with social isssues that ICANN simply won't - makes me wonder who is really calling the shots nowadays - perhaps more on that later as well.... [ObDisclaimer: I work for Tucows, Tucows sells and supports VGRS IDNs, I'm not involved in Tucows IDN initiatives, but I do work in policyspace on IDN issues. None of this is Tucows officialspeak per the standing disclaimer at the bottom of this page that applies to all of the content here.]