DNS Belgium Chosed Valideus to Validate .Brussels and .Vlaanderen Applications

DNS Belgium, the company behind .BE extension, announced that it has selected DNS Valideus to validate applications for .Vlaanderen and .Brussels domain names during the second phase of the launch.

You can read the press release after the jump:

“DNS Belgium has selected Valideus from the various candidates to validate applications for .vlaanderen and .brussels domain names during the second phase of the launch.  This phase runs from 2nd October to 3rd November 2014.

The launch of .vlaanderen and .brussels will take place in different phases. Phase one is designed for trademark owners that have their trademarks recorded in the TMCH database. During the second phase local organisations, businesses and government institutions will be able to apply for a domain name, based on their corporate name, trading name, trademark, geographical name, etc. During this phase, we will be calling on the services of an external provider to examine and validate the applications.

To find this validation partner, DNS Belgium contacted a number of providers out in the market at the end of last year. They were asked to submit a proposal to us. We retained  8 of these proposals and invited the providers to submit a final price quote. In the end, 4 of them made us a binding offer and from those, we selected Valideus.

Validation platform and law firm

In particular, Valideus was able to win us over by offering a clever combination of a technical specialist (Valideus) and a large law firm (Novagraaf). Valideus will handle the operational aspects of the process. This includes setting up the platform and the technical integration with DNS Belgium and back-end registry. Novagraaf will be responsible for the actual validations of the applications. Depending on the influx of applications, Novagraaf can also very quickly draft in additional validators from its offices in Paris and Amsterdam.

Right now, DNS Belgium and Valideus are in the process of setting up and configuring the validation platform. We expect this platform to be fully up and running by the end of the summer, in plenty of time for the beginning of our launch phase.

Once Valideus has validated an application, the name can also effectively be registered as a .vlaanderen and/or .brussels domain name. We will give you more details about the validation process soon.”