DNS History
Professor Verbaeten of the Computer Science department of the Catholic University of Leuven started registering domain names in Belgium in 1989.
Up to 1994, 129 names were registered. Since then, the number has risen sharply. see statistics).
At the request of Pierre Verbaeten, the responsibility for the registration of the domain names for .be was transferred to DNS Belgium, a non-profit association, which was established for this purpose on 2 February 1999 (articles of association). The actual transfer took place on 1 January 2000.
Initially, obtaining a domain name was tied to a number of strict rules. For example, the name had to correspond to the name of the company, a brand name or trading style. Furthermore, only businesses could register a domain name. Over the years, the rules have undergone various changes, depending on external factors. In 2000, for example, the rules looked as follows: old registration procedure.
The Board of Directors of DNS decided in June 2000, following the example of other European registers, to make the rules for obtaining domain names under ".be" more flexible. De facto, a complete liberalization took place, where everyone, companies and private individuals, Belgians or foreigners, could register any name they liked. Henceforth, registration would be completely automatic, and could only be carried out via an approved agent. After the development of the necessary software, this liberalization was carried out on 11/12/2000.
At the same time as the liberalization, prices were lowered. The price charged to the agents for 1 year was still 25 EUR from then on. One important restriction was maintained: a domain name could not be transferred to another licensee.
The effect was enormous. At the start of the liberalization, the number of domain names was 40,000. After less than 3 weeks, the number had more than doubled (end of December: 89,718); by the end of March more than 125,000 were registered.
Next, on 1/7/2001, a first price cut was implemented. Registration and annual renewal from reduced to 10 EUR. A year later, this price was brought down still further to 6 EUR.
Meanwhile, the redundant network of the .be name servers was replaced by machines under the control of DNS. In the past, these machines and their connectivity were provided as a free service without any guarantees. This change brought us to a network of our own machines, installed at commercial nodes on the one hand, and Internet exchange points on the other hand.
On 15/10/2001, the rule of non-transferability of a domain name was abolished, and domain names could now be traded freely.
In September 2002, the European Commission issued a call for tenders for the management of the .eu domain. DNS Belgium set up a consortium with its colleagues from Sweden and Italy to respond to the Call. The Belgian model forms the basis of the proposal.
A panel of external specialists awarded the management of .eu to EURid, the consortium of Belgian, Swedish and Italian registries. This decision was published in May 2003.
As from 1 September 2006 the registrar fee of a .be domain name was reduced from 6 € to 5 €, from 1 January 2008 to 3 € and from 1 February 2009 to 2,5 €. This reduction applies to all new registrations, renewals, transfers and "trades". The fee for the reactivations and transfers out of quarantine remains at the current level of 10 € and 40 €.
