International characters to appear in domain names?

It's long been stated by some that the lack of international characters in domain names was a barrier to a fully international Internet (although I always thought it was international), as only 37 characters have been able to be used in domain names (Latin alphabet letters, numbers, hyphens etc).

ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) have been undertaking some lab testing to see if some of these international characters (e.g. Chinese) would cause any problems with the Internet's root DNS servers.

And the good news is that no noticeable impact was seen on the root servers in the lab testing, although further usability (end user) testing is needed before the decision can be made on whether to launch these new format of names.