Quoting Jarrod Hollingworth on Friday November 29, 2002:
| 
| Does anyone know when the new International Domain Name (IDN) system will
| come into place, allowing domain names to be registered in foreign languages
| (such as Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese) by encoding them?
| 
| I know that many international domain names have already been registered but
| the encoding method was not finalised and therefore these names may have to
| be re-registered once the final encoding method is decided. I'd like to know
| when it goes live and I haven't been able to find out.

The stringprep, punycode and idna specs are undergoing final review.
They are sitting in the RFC Editor queue. They should be published in
the coming weeks/months.

Any "pre-registered" IDN's wont work. I have surveyed many key zone
files to collect a list of those matching "??--" and they will be
discarded for consideration as the ultimate prefix. Additionally, almost
every registry bans the registration of domains matching that pattern
(including .au)

No-one know when it will "go live", but I don't believe you will be able
to register them in .au soon. There are substantial policy issues that
need to be worked through before deployment, particularly given our
native language is English.

kim