There are probably many interesting things going on in Rome at the moment,
but here is a quick sidenote:

Denic has introduced the beloved German "Umlaute" äöü and many more letters
to the .de namespace based on punycode. See
http://www.denic.de/de/domains/idns/liste.html for a complete listing of
the new letters -- with German commentaries, but at least the letters are
international. They started accepting requests on March 1, at 10:00 on a
randomized first come first served basis. Requests were processed via a
signed emails (standard procedure). Even though there were several test
runs, the email server went down after 70 seconds, and it took three hours
to solve the technical problems. ".de" ist the biggest ccTLD with 7.2
Million domains. So far, 550.000 IDN requests have been processed (see
http://www.denic.de/de/domains/idns/start.html).

It seems that it is not an easy thing to do, but it can be done. However,
you will need a modern browser that follows international standards to open
the IDN pages: Microsoft IE does, of course, not work, but Mozilla or Opera
work fine. Also, you must figure out how to to access the letters via
keyboard or operating system, or you use copy and paste.

It is estimated, that about 70% of the new domains went to squatters. You
can check that and also if copy and past works for you by going to eg.
http://www.anwälte.de (German word for "lawyers").  The site says that
"this offer is still under construction". However, the porno link below is
already functional, I guess. BTW: The first domain registered was "öko.de",
that's a German abbreviation for "ecological" (and that server is not up
yet).

        --iliya