Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are sure to extend the reach of the Internet to all the linguistic communities, and make it truly global. Development of this protocol has been a laborious process, which has taken a decade to mature, and is now being approved as this report goes for printing. The main challenges in the development of IDNs have been the need to keep the existing highly distributed Internet stable and secure as the namespace expands, while concurrently supporting a variety of writing systems, those encoded in Unicode and those which will be encoded in the future. With the deployment at hand, the near future is sure to see emerging business models, social experiments and technical solutions associated with IDNs.