IDNs are active now.
Go to China and type an IDN into your address bar, up will come the spyware, local ISP, government site, or government internet partner (Google) that has contracted to take over your error page search traffic. They are defacto resolving these URLs now. More people will not switch from existing real extensions to IDNs once they begin to resolve IMO. The traffic that exists in IDNs will get no better.
In fact, as IDN's start to roll out in a big way the existing players (establishment) will be big traffic losers and they will not like it. Therefore I predict IDN's used for PPC (to make money) will be doomed as the entrenched existing players conspire against them.
This exact same thing would happen with ISPs/AOL/MSN in America except for one glaring difference: In a free market, when people are not able to visit the site they perceive to exist; they change browsers, providers (whatever) to get the content they perceive to be real. "My friend saw a bunch of hamsters dancing at this website and all I am getting is an MSN search page.. Damn.. I'm switching to Firefox".
Most of the populace in countries where IDN's are relevant do not have such consumer friendly democratic mindsets or alternatives as illustrated above, so from an entrepreneirs perspective IDNs will be alot more work than they look like and not nearly as lucrative from a paid-search perspective as their .COM/NET/ORG/CCTLD-of-the-country-you-are-in brethren.
That's just how it is.
