When ICANN opened the 2026 new gTLD round, it said that accepting applications in 27 scripts would make the Internet easier to use for billions of people who write in non-Latin scripts. Bangla is one of those 27. On October 7, ICANN published the 1,615 applications it received, so I went through them looking for Bangla ones.

What’s in the File

I downloaded the full application list from ICANN’s site on October 29. It has 2,783 records: 1,614 primary applications and 1,169 replacement-string records. I searched every field for Bangla characters and found none.

ICANN counts 21 applications for internationalized domain names (IDNs), plus nine for variants. Apart from one Latin-script name with an accent, .québec, every IDN in the file is in Han characters, so Chinese or Japanese. There’s nothing in Arabic, Devanagari, Cyrillic or Korean.

The 2012 round looked quite different. It drew 116 IDN applications out of 1,930, about 6%, and 15 of those were in Arabic. This time it’s 21 out of 1,615, about 1.3%, and not one is in Arabic.

South Asia

By applicant location, India has ten applications, Nepal has one and Bangladesh has one. I found none from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan or the Maldives. Five of India’s ten are brand TLDs from companies such as Flipkart, Myntra and Zoho. The other five Indian applications, Nepal’s .dns and Bangladesh’s one application all carry the Applicant Support label. So every non-brand application from the region came through ICANN’s support program. ICANN says 51 applications came through that program in total, so these seven make up about one in seven of them.

The One Application From Bangladesh

According to ICANN’s published record, it comes from a private limited company registered in Dhaka. The string is .portal, written in Latin letters. ICANN’s support program gives qualified applicants a 75—85% cut in the evaluation fee, along with other help. As of October 29, ICANN lists the application as active and in pre-evaluation processing, and no objections have been published yet.

The company isn’t alone. Five other applicants want .portal, from the United States (two), the Cayman Islands, Malta and the UAE, and none of them carries the support label. Under the 2026 rules, applicants who want the same string can’t settle it privately. What’s left is a community priority evaluation, where it applies, or an ICANN auction. Whether these six applications become a formal contention set is for ICANN to confirm on November 17. It’s the kind of fight I wrote about in my last piece on contention sets. Either way, even the one application from Bangladesh isn’t in Bangla.

The Bangla Extension Bangladesh Already Has

.বাংলা was delegated in 2016 and opened for registration on January 1, 2017, according to The Business Standard. In October 2021 the paper quoted figures from BTCL officials: 610 registered .বাংলা names, down from 905 in 2019. The .bd count fell too, from 46,800 to 31,042. The paper pointed to trade-licence requirements and slow manual processing. I couldn’t find newer public figures, so I can’t say whether things have changed since.

Why Might Nobody Have Applied?

I don’t know, and the file can’t tell me. There are a few possible reasons. The evaluation fee is USD 227,000 per application, before any conditional evaluation fees and before the cost of running a registry. Bangladesh already has a Bangla-script extension that hasn’t taken off, so a new Bangla gTLD would start with weak evidence of demand. And the support discount, large as it is, still leaves a bill to pay. None of this proves that people don’t want Bangla names. In an earlier piece, I argued that a crowded fight is not the same as value. An empty field doesn’t prove the opposite.

What to Watch Next

These numbers could still move a bit. The application window closed on August 12, so no new strings can be added, but applicants can withdraw, and some may have switched to their replacement strings after Reveal Day. ICANN publishes the final list on November 17, and a community input and objections period starts after that. ICANN describes it as a formal comment period, so anyone with a view on a string can speak up.

If a script is on ICANN’s list and nobody applies for it, what’s actually missing?