Internationalized domain names coming next year

Internationalized domain names coming next year:

The recent Internet Governance Forum in Athens featured lots of talk about the way that the 'Net is run, but nothing generated more discussion than internationalized domain names (IDNs).

If they upgrade domain names to support UTF-8, which of your IS systems are going to break? If you're a global company, is that acceptable?

How about web pages? What if you started to have to accept email addresses in native character sets, not us-ascii or just utf-8? How does this complicate your life?

this is coming, sooner or later. I'm guessing it gets delayed, because I expect most IS systems and databases simply can't handle this, and the amount of work to do the upgrades is going to be difficult for many companies. But it's coming, and people who deal with email addresses should start evaluating what it's going to mean for them...