Bangla domain criminally neglected

The country's own bangla internet domain (.bangla) has failed to garner much enthusiasm among users though it allows them to write their web addresses in Bangla alphabets and end with .bangla.

State-owned Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL) owns the domain that they got from the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in October 2016.

Neither the Bangla nor the English domains (.bd) are in BTCL's focus, as a result of which as a nation Bangladesh is also missing its presence in the international internet community, said industry insiders.

So far BTCL has sold only 595 bangla web domains, and a good number of them are not active even.

And for dot bd (.bd) that BTCL has received in 2003, the total domain number is about 50,000.

"Both bangla domain and .bd domain are huge assets but I think BTCL has failed to promote it," said Sumon Ahmed Sabir, a member of multi stakeholder advisory group of UN's Internet Governance Forum (IGF).

BTCL cannot exploit people's emotions for the bangla domain, said Sabir, also the chief technology officer of Fiber@Home Global, one of the leading wholesale bandwidth suppliers of the country.

However, Bangladesh had won the six-year-long battle that started in 2010 with Indian state West Bengal and Sierra Leone, one of whose official languages is Bangla, for the internationalised domain name (IDN) label-dot bangla.

After winning that battle Bangladeshi people got the right to write Bangla in internet and open websites in their mother language.

Today is the international mother language day and ICANN has also considered the language movement for allocating the bangla domain, said officials who were related with the issue that time.

The domain was inaugurated by the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on December 2016 but after that the domains did not get much attention from the authority.

To promote the bangla domain BTCL was trying to sell it in the last few years at the Ekushey Boi Mela. So far, only two bangla domains were sold at this year's book fair, said officials.

But in Sabir's view BTCL cannot go for promotion, which is what is actually required here.

"And most importantly we are not sure about their security system and that's why corporates are not willing to get on board the bangla domain and .bd domain," Sabir added.

In February 2017 local mobile brand 'WE' has taken bangla domain as the first private company but this domain is not active.

A top executive who has left the job last month said though they have bangla web address most of the viewers browse through the English web.

Telecom minister Mustafa Jabbar also expressed his dissatisfaction about the BTCL's apathy towards promoting the bangla domain.

He said: "BTCL should take up a programme to popularise the bangla domain, which will also give us pride. You will find that very fewer countries in the world have their own language internet domain. We have that privilege and why we are wasting that?"

Sabir said if BTCL plans they even can earn handsome revenue from selling the bangla domain, which they can use for improving internet penetration like Brazil did.

The South American nation used to earn huge amounts from .br, which they used for building their internet infrastructure.

"The citizens are ultimately benefitted," he said, while citing neighbouring India as another example.

India successfully managed to brand .in for the country's internet identity, according to Sabir. 

But for that first BTCL needs to ensure both .bd and bangla domains' security systems and try to promote it by mixing with emotion and country branding.