I haven't seen the implementation plan, but it shouldn't require unicode. Current IDNs (currently available below the ccTLD and gTLD level) are implemented with

I haven't seen the implementation plan, but it shouldn't require unicode. Current IDNs (currently available below the ccTLD and gTLD level) are implemented with Punycode, and the rollout was mostly a non-issue. We've got fraud working just fine with ASCII--non-latin character sets don't really change that. For the latin-keyboard crowd, imagine having to type in an umlaut every time you wanted to go to Google.