DNS Belgium, the not for profit registry for .be, has made changes to their public whois.
From now on the telephone number of registrants will no longer be displayed in public whois.
The change will impact all .be domain names, whether they are registered to a natural person (ie. a private individual) or a legal person such as a company or other organisation.
If you do a lookup on a domain name in the public whois the data you see will depend on whether or not the organisation field is populated or not. If the organisation field has been filled then you will see their address. However regardless of what is in that field the phone number will no longer be visible.
According to DNS Belgium this change has been made in order to comply with GDPR, though it’s unclear as to why it took them 5 years to make the change.
If you want to contact the registrant of a .be domain name there’s an option to do so via a form on the registry web based whois service.
There are over 1.7 million .be domain names currently registered.
