DNS.BE,the company behind .BE domain extension,announced that from now one,everbody will be able to register .BE domain names with accented letters.

You can read the announcement after the jump :

"This morning at 10:00 CEST, the IDN functionality was added to the .be domain, allowing anybody to register .be domain names with accented letters. The launch started strong with already more than 3,000 registered IDN domain names in the first half hour.

This also meant that the .be registration system received a vast amount of requests in a short period of time. However, the system managed these requests without a hitch. As expected, most of the IDN domain names were registered within the first hour, after which the volumes dropped to a normal level. At 16:00 CEST, the .be domain was 5,284 IDN domain names strong.

We performed a first scan on this list of IDN domain names to identify possible phishing cases. As a result of this scan, we did not notice a high number of suspicious registrations.

Below we present an overview of the 10 most popular IDN domain names, based on the number of requests received:

1.    café.be

2.    météo.be

3.    h?tels.be

4.    bébé.be

5.    crédit.be

6.    h?tel.be

7.    één.be

8.    itali?.be

9.    cinéma.be

10.  chateau.be

This is an overview of the 10 first IDN domain names registered:

1.    café.be

2.    météo. be

3.    h?tels.be

4.    bébé.be

5.    crédit.be

6.    cinéma.be

7.    itali?.be

8.    université.be

9.    énergie.be

10.  référencement.be

The first statistics indicate that 79,73% of all IDN domain names were registered by an inhabitant of Belgium. Together with the high number of registration on the first day, this demonstrates that with the launch of IDN we are meeting a real need in Belgium."