ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has put all steps in place to allow website addresses In non¬Latin characters, after years of debates on the challenges and merits of doing so. The move opens up millions of possibilities for new website URLs to be registered using characters In scripts as diverse as Devanagrl, Arable, Chinese, Japanese and Russian, In addition to accented Latin characters and other symbols .

URLs have so far been restricted to the letters A-Z, numbers 1-9, and hyphens. The new rules would expand that to nearly 100,000 possible characters. "This Is the biggest technical change to the Internet's addressing system-the Domain Name System-In many years" said a senior ICANN spokesperson In a press statement.

Countries will also have top-level domains in their own national languages. For the first time, Internet users who don't understand English at all will be able to use addresses completely in their own scripts. A fast-track registration process opened on November 16. Immense overhauls to the backends of the Internet's DNS system were required.

However security companies fear that the new rules will widen the scope for spoofing genuine URLs, allowing attackers to send out links with familiar-looking characters or subtle unnoticeable accents. Intellectual property rights holders will also have to register dozens of new similar-looking URLs to protect their own sites from spoofing, and the potential to find new lookalike URLs will be much greater.