.be

.be is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Belgium. It is managed by DNS Belgium.

Delegation History

.be was introduced in 1988. Professor Pierre Verbaeten of the Leuven Catholic University (known as “KU Leuven” in Dutch) is appointed manager. On February 1999, the not-for-profit organisation dns.be is founded by ISPA Belgium, BELTUG and Fabrimetal (subsequently renamed Agoria) in order to take over the registration of domain names from the KU Leuven, which happens on January 2000.

Rules and Restrictions

DNS Belgium will not accept domain names that are already registered, names that have been removed but are still in quarantine,names that have been withdrawn or blocked by DNS Belgium on the basis of a court order or injunction.

The registrant represents and warrants the following:

• all statements (in which in particular the contact data of the registrant are explicitly meant) madeduring the registration process and the term of the registration are complete and accurate;
• registering the domain name will not infringe or otherwise violate the rights of a third party;
• the domain name is not registered for an unlawful purpose;
• the domain name is not used in violation of any applicable laws or regulations, such as a namethat helps to discriminate on the basis of race, language, sex, religion or political view;
• the domain name is not contrary to public order or morality (e.g. obscene or offensive names);
• the domain name is not registered with contact data that have as goal to shield the real identity of the registrant.

= Characters

For Internationalized domain names (IDNs), there cannot be:

• names where the U-label (IDN with the special characters) consists of less than 2 characters or names where the A-label (the version of an IDN that has been transformed into ASCII characters; it always starts with the prefix ‘xn--‘) and/or the U-label consist of more than 63 characters
• names where the U-label starts of ends with a ‘-‘
• names where the U-label contains a ‘-‘ on the third and fourth position
• names where the U-label contains other characters than the ‘a-z’, ‘0-9’, ‘-‘ or the following: ß, á, à, â, ã, ä, å, æ, ç, é, è, ê, ë, í, ì, î, ï, ð, ñ, ó, ò, ô, ö, ø, ú, ù, û, ü, ý, þ, ÿ and oe.

For non-IDN domain names, they cannot:

• consist of less than two characters or more than 63 characters
• contain other characters than ‘a-z’, ‘0-9’ or ‘-‘
• have a ‘-‘ on the third and fourth position
• start or end with a ‘-‘.

Country code top-level domain

Internationalized Domain Name