Several Registries have used the "Second Eastern Europe for ccTLDs Registries and Registrars" (which EuroDNS was attending) to announce their plans regarding IDNs, both on the domain name side but also as far as the TLD is concerned.
It is easy to consider International Domain Names (IDNs) as superfluous when residing in one of the many countries that uses latin alphabets and scripts. When travelling to eastern Europe as we did this Monday, it makes a lot of sense. Cyrillic characters are not recognized by default in the DNS and domain names must be registered in a specific way in order to be displayed with the correct characters. Now that web browsers finally widely accept the non-ascii format and that new TLDs are finally getting ready, things may very well change as explained by the .RU and .EU Registries.
.EU is a one of a kind Top Level Domain since it is Regional extension covering several countries. As a result, international domain names must support not only ascii but in as much as 23 languages! On December 10th EURID will begin accepting IDN registrations in all corresponding scripts. We don't have much details on the process yet but Domain News will publish all the relevant details on Thursday from a dedicated EURID event in Brussels.
A little further away but perhaps more exciting, the .RU ccTLD announced that it was ready to launch a cyrillic version of .RF (Russian Federation) next summer, making it the first known country to take advantage of the IDN part of the new gTLDs process, when it is finally ready. Also of interest, the Registry has finally decided to harmonize .RU and .SU, the almost deprecated TLD dating from the Soviet era.