If this proposal goes ahead, its going to be very difficult to distinguish between domains in Latin characters and others such as Cyrillic. What does this mean? It’s going to:

a) increase phishing as organized crime is going to catch on that they can register ebay.com or bank.com using Cyrillic characters. Best of all, those domain names will not be registered because the character sets are different.

b) increase the number of dodgy, misleading domain names that are for sale on auction sites. We all know the good old trick of using an 0 (zero) as opposed to an O (oh). Introducing non Latin characters makes it all that more difficult. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against it entirely - I just think its going to introduce problems - many of which haven’t been thought about or widely discussed.

Will there be another mini landrush to grab all those trademarks using Cyrillic? Who knows. It also presents a problem when you show Cryillic in italics and non italics:

We will see what ICANN comes up with later today.