Stephane Bortzmeyer: Since a Punycode name is a regular domain name, there was nothing to test and the authors of the different documents have some merit to be able to produce even these few pages. A lot of ICANN's money spent on that. Autonomica can thank them. (Of course, ICANN's primary motive was probably more to procrastinate about IDN.)
(2) The ICANN test just announced was not in the full root but rather a lab-like, more limited environment.
(3) As for a real-life test in large numbers on a large fraction of net users, [ China and the Arabic world have been using IDNs for years ]
This is all correct. As I just noted, all this verified is that a few widely used DNS servers and clients do not deliberately break IDNs. But nobody thought they did. The hard problem with IDNs is political, what the rules are to prevent registrations of two names that appear "too similar" for whatever definition of similar you'd like to use. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.