Belgian Country Code Now Supports IDN

Earlier this week dns.be launched IDNs (internationalised domain names).

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:

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