.বাংলা

.বাংলা ("Bangla") is a second and internationalized country code top-level domain (ccTLD) that was granted to Bangladesh in 2011. This domain is meant for web addresses in the Bengali language. Like .bd, it is administered by the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology.

.বাংলা is represented in ASCII-compatible encoding to the IDNA specification as “xn--54b7fta0cc”. The individual Unicode code points that comprise this string are U+09AC U+09BE U+0982 U+09B2 U+09BE.

History

Beginning in December 2009, the currently listed sponsoring organization for the .bd ccTLD, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of Bangladesh, held multiple meetings with various local government and Internet community stakeholders regarding the selection of the IDN ccTLD string for Bangladesh.

In February 2010, the multi stakeholder community reached consensus that the appropriate string to represent the Bangladesh IDN ccTLD is .বাংলা (.xn--54b7fta0cc). The Prime Minister of Bangladesh also ratified this decision in the same month.

On 20 December 2010, an application was made to ICANN’s “IDN Fast Track” process to have the string “বাংলা” recognized as representing Bangladesh in Bengali script.

On 10 March 2011, a review by the IDN Fast Track DNS Stability Panel found that the applied-for string “presents none of the threats to the stability or security of the DNS identified in Module 4 of the Fast Track implementation plan, and presents an acceptably low risk of user confusion.” The request for the “বাংলা” string to represent Bangladesh was subsequently approved.

In the following years, multiple meetings were held among local Internet community stakeholders including the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission to reach a decision on the management of both the .bd and .বাংলা top-level domains.

During this time, the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications was reorganized and combined with the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology to form the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology in February 2014. The same reorganization also created two divisions namely “Posts and Telecommunications Division” and “Information and Communication Technology Division” within the ministry.

Subsequently on 7 June 2015, the decision was made to have the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Posts and Telecommunications Division serve as the sponsoring organization for both the .bd and .বাংলা top-level domains while the Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL) was appointed as the technical contact for these domains. Under this structure, BTCL will be responsible for the operations of both the .bd and .বাংলা domains while the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Posts and Telecommunications Division will oversee all the functionality of BTCL and conduct periodic reviews of the domain management policies.

On 8 July 2015, the Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Posts and Telecommunications Division commenced a request to ICANN for the delegation of .বাংলা as a top-level domain.

According to an article from October 2016 published on Techworld Bangladesh, Bangladesh had got their permission to initiate the বাংলা domain.