The top level naming system of the internet is expanding to include non-roman characters and a multitude of new suffixes. The familiar .edu, .net, .com, .countrycodes will be joined by
http://उदाहरण.परीक्षा
http://例え.テスト
http://例子.测试
as well as
.lol
.docs
.nyc
.travel
and lots and lots of others.
Assumptions about the format of domain, website names and email addresses will have to be updated.
The smaller new domain suffixes will be set up with a specific registrar possibly making the hunting of rogue domains even harder.
IT departments and software companies are scrabbling to ensure compatibility and reliability of internet services. Looking forward to an inevitable change that shifts the foundations within a hugely diverse set of infrastructure is as nerve racking as the Y2K episode all over again. Lets hope the preparation work gets done and the new gTLDs have the same minimal impact as Y2K. Somehow I doubt it.
Addition ..
Domain names now contain non-roman characters. These would have to be processed into equivalent but unique ascii before regex/applications could work reliably. See RFC 3490 Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) ... See https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3490 which has
Until now, there has been no standard method for domain names to use
characters outside the ASCII repertoire. This document defines
internationalized domain names (IDNs) and a mechanism called
Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) for handling
them in a standard fashion. IDNs use characters drawn from a large
repertoire (Unicode), but IDNA allows the non-ASCII characters to be
represented using only the ASCII characters already allowed in so-
called host names today. This backward-compatible representation is
required in existing protocols like DNS, so that IDNs can be
introduced with no changes to the existing infrastructure. IDNA is
only meant for processing domain names, not free text.
