Professor Verbaeten of the Computer Science department of the Catholic University of Leuven started registering domain names in Belgium in 1989.
At his request, the responsibility for the registration of the domain names for .be was transferred to DNS Belgium, a non-profit association, established for this purpose on 2 February 1999.
To allow more flexibility, a complete liberalization took place, where everyone could register any name they liked.
As a result, the number of domain names doubled (89,718) and 3 months later 125,000 were registered.
A number of price cuts were implemented and brought down to 6 EUR.
In 2001, the rule of non-transferability of a domain name was abolished, and domain names could be traded freely.
In September 2002, the European Commission issued a call for tenders for the management of the .eu domain. DNS Belgium set up a consortium with its colleagues from Sweden and Italy to respond to the Call. The Belgian model forms the basis of the proposal.
A panel of external specialists awarded the management of .eu to EURid, the consortium of Belgian, Swedish and Italian registries. This decision was published in May 2003.
As from 1 September 2006 the registrar fee of a .be domain name is 5 €. This reduction applies to all new registrations, renewals, transfers and "trades".
