Is this opinion from experience or just opinion?
Experience.
At that price I wouldn’t mind – but the official JP registrars still charge $99 or more per year.
IE7 will be out soon, it will be an automatic update. It will be IDN friendly
All the search engines are IDN compatible already.
IDNs are the only domains for Japanese that have any seo value.
My domain テレビゲーム.com (console games) if you search for the term it’s on the front page of Yahoo Japan. I didn’t even do a lot to optimize it.
From an SEO perspective, you are correct. Obviously easier to optimize for the correct words in the target language. However, it is still debatable whether an IDN domain will be widely accepted or even trusted.
Japanese see Bingo in Japanese & recocgnize it. When they see it they can remember it. You think a Japanese person (in Japan) is going to spell “Affiliate” in English correctly?
So I respect your opinion, but I’d like to see you post facts to back up IDNs being worthless.
The biggest problem is that IDNs are not currently supported. When browsers start supporting IDNs (as you suggest above) this may change – for all we know it could change the face of the Internet.
But then again, this is what was once said about the NEW.NET extensions – .game, .club etc. Even with the plugin, these extensions proved worthless.
It is impossible to post any “fact” to support an IDN extension or not. It is, however, possible to post an opinion – and that is what I have done.
Is looking so forward to the release of IE7 so that IDNs will be the normal domains of Japan.
So I’m just going to present unbiased facts about them. No hype, just facts.
The fact is, IDNs are unsupported and at this writing remain unsupported.