[greggman]

I agree with this. Also, many years ago when they started allowing unicode domain names several of my Japan friends thought Japan would switch over to unicode domain names. It's now been several years and I have yet to see a single Japanese website with a Japanese character domain name. (I'm sure someone will pull one up just now ;)

The problem (one problem?) is legacy devices. At the time most phones and possibly even some browsers had limited input to URL fields in ascii only. The keyboard they'd show when you when to enter a URL didn't provide the input methods for non-ascii text.

So, having a non-ascii domain would have only lost you customers. Or made it more confusing. As in do I go to mitsubishi.com or 三菱.com? (三菱.jp is registered but googling for site:三菱.jp brings up zero hits)

I'm not saying I'm against non-ascii email names. I'm just suggesting it's not likely to change much anytime soon. Just a guess