People of the country are going to get the chance of using dot bangla domain soon as the Posts and Telecommunications Division (PTD) would sit today to finalize the terms and conditions for the mass usages. “A meeting to be chaired by state minister for posts and telecommunications Tarana Halim at PTD tomorrow would fix usage policy of dot bangla domain,” a PTD official told BSS. State-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL), the assigned organization to handle the domain, has completed preparation to start distribution among the users within few days after the approval of PTD. BTCL Director (Public Relations and Publication) Meer Mohammad Morshed last week said: “We would seek application from the users soon for .bangla after completing some administrative procedures.” Mentioning that they’ve already completed agreement paper, he said: “customer could do all procedures for .bangla through online while registration fee would be received using state-own mobile phone operator Teletalk.” 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 Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology informing the decision on October 5. Indian state West Bengal and Sierra Leone, one of whose official languages is Bangla, had also applied for the internationalized domain name (IDN) label-dot bangla. 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. According to the BTCL, total registered users of .bd have reached at 36,500. Domain names, such as “bssnews.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.
