It's all in the keyboards!!!
If the keyboard has the characters on it, they will be used.
In france there are many who object to idns for french Domains. Those that object are usually those highly invested in ascii french Domains. This objection holds true in some of the Spanish countries as well, but not as strong as the french. Also, I don't believe that the .fr extension allows idns. If .fr allowed IDNs there would be a very quick shift in thinking.
What's most interesting to me in reading the french forums is that all the content is accented french (correctly), yet the most accepted domains are non-accented ascii's .
May be a different story for french canadians and swiss french.
It's also a generational thing. As IDNs are developed around the world, they will be the "Domain of Choice"
It's also a feedback thing, like Pavlov's dogs....how would you like getting a 404/or page not found everytime you typed in an address in your native language...and your old browser choked on it...
Times have changed, updates in browser and the registration of millions of IDNs (a lot of good ones are already regged) will now allow for a better user experience.
With the recent report of Firefox's 29 percent penetration into european countries..and with many IDNs developed or on the way to being developed...guess what
It appears that snowball has left the top of the mountain.
