[rhys]

Five years from now the players with the biggest IDN domain portfolios will be MSN, Google, and Yahoo. They will also own the vast majority of significant natural traffic ASCII domains. The only thing which stops them now on ASCII is that the market is not consolidated enough, but that is happening rapidly. Basically, one could buy up most ASCII domains worth having for a billion or so, it's not a significant cost for the search engines for something that guarantees them market share.