I actually have some firsthand experience with the IDN governance (long story short, I and other people opposed a certain kind of expansion in allowed Korean do

I actually have some firsthand experience with the IDN governance (long story short, I and other people opposed a certain kind of expansion in allowed Korean domain names [1]), and I was once told that IDN basically happened because the PRC government threatened that they will make their own DNS equivalent otherwise. I don't know how much of this is true---while who said this is supposed to know what's going on, I don't know if one actually knows that---but it did sound plausible given the haste nature of IDN and subsequent measures like LGRs. [1] https://no-hanja-domain.github.io/ https://no-hanja-domain.github.io/ (in Korean)