DNS Belgium is a

non-profit organisation A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

responsible for managing the ccTLD

top level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...

, as well as the new gTLD domain extensions and . Domain names are registered by the various agents of DNS Belgium, on behalf of their individual clients, as part of a

decentralised Decentralization or decentralisation is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group. Conce ...

registration and applications procedure. Established in 1999 by the Internet Service Providers Association, Fabrimetal and the Belgium Telecommunications Users Group, DNS Belgium adopted this decentralised network of registrars on December 11, 2000 in order to create a simpler, automated procedure for the registration of domain names. Since 2003, the company has been party to a data

escrow An escrow is a contractual arrangement in which a third party (the stakeholder or escrow agent) receives and disburses money or property for the primary transacting parties, with the disbursement dependent on conditions agreed to by the transacti ...

agreement, to ensure continuity of services. The organisation's name is derived, in part, from the term ''

domain name server A name server refers to the server component of the Domain Name System (DNS), one of the two principal namespaces of the Internet. The most important function of DNS servers is the translation (resolution) of human-memorable domain names (example. ...

''. In 2012 DNS Belgium was awarded the management of the new

gTLD Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of eve ...

extensions and , both of which were launched in the summer of 2014. DNS.be is a founder member of the EURid consortium which administers the TLD, and provided the model upon which that organization is based.

References

External links

* Domain name registries Non-profit organisations based in Belgium {{compu-domain-stub