Bangladesh gets dot bangla domain

The International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) has officially allotted the dot bangla (.bangla) internet domain to Bangladesh.

The ICANN sent a letter to the Ministry of Post & Telecommunications in this regard, according to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) website.

Indian state West Bengal and Sierra Leone, one of whose official languages is Bangla, had also applied for the Internationalised domain name (IDN) label-dot bangla (.বাংলা).

Earlier, ICANN-approved another domain label for Bangladesh as dot bd or .bd. From now on, .bangla is Bangladesh's own Unicode domain label.

It is the second country code top-level domain (TLD) for Bangla websites.

Domain names, such as ‘thedailystar.net’, were originally designed only to support ASCII characters. In 2003, a specification was released that allows most Unicode characters to be used in domain names. IDNs are supported by all modern browsers and email programmes, so people can use links in their native languages.

Therefore, users can go to the BTCL website (www.btcl.com.bd) by typing ‘বিটিসিএল.বাংলা’ in Bangla fonts in the browser.