Belgian Country Code Now Supports Internationalized Domain Names

Home / Blogs

Belgian Country Code Now Supports Internationalized Domain Names

	By Michele Neylon MD of Blacknight Solutions
	June 14, 2013 Views: 10,220 Add Comment

Earlier this week dns.be launched Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs).

The Belgian registry opted to support the accented characters for Dutch, French and German. In so doing they’ve also ended up providing support for other European languages, such as Swedish, Finnish and Danish.

The characters supported are below:

ß*	à	á	â	ã	ó	ô	þ	ü	ú	ð
æ	å	ï	ç	è	õ	ö	ÿ	ý	ò	ä
œ	ê	ë	ì	í	ø	ù	î	û	ñ	é

The registry reported quite a bit of interest in the launch with over 3000 IDN domains being registered in the first hour. That number had practically doubled by close of business on the first day.

So what domains are people registering?

The most popular requests were:

1. café.be
2. météo.be
3. hôtels.be
4. bébé.be
5. crédit.be
6. hôtel.be
7. één.be
8. italië.be
9. cinéma.be
10. château.be

The registry announced that close to 80% of the IDN domains registered were registered to Belgian residents, thus reinforcing the view that IDNs were in demand from the local market.

More details here.

By Michele Neylon, MD of Blacknight Solutions

Filed Under

Comments

The Weekly Wrap

More and more professionals are choosing to publish critical posts on CircleID from all corners of the Internet industry. If you find it hard to keep up daily, consider subscribing to our weekly digest. We will provide you a convenient summary report once a week sent directly to your inbox. It's a quick and easy read.

I make a point of reading CircleID. There is no getting around the utility of knowing what thoughtful people are thinking and saying about our industry.

VINTON CERF
Co-designer of the TCP/IP Protocols & the Architecture of the Internet