question Amazon uses a .com.be subdomain. But are other subdomains of com.be for sale anywhere?

[AniMeshorer]

These days Amazon heavily advertises in Belgian media. They use the amazon.com.be URL in their commercials.

This is odd. Belgium only has one nationwide ccTLD, and that is .be proper. The registry does not operate any third-level domain sales. This means someone has to own the domain com.be and create subdomains under that domain. Amazon uses such a subdomain.

However, it is totally unclear to me who owns this domain, and if the owner allows the registration of other subdomains under com.be?

As a lot of good names are already taken with .be proper, .com.be domains could be useful as long as the subdomains are registered by a stable organisation that sells those subdomains for a low price (it wouldn't make sense if a subdomain of com.be would be more expensive than a .be domain proper).

I am from Belgium, and never saw another .com.be in use other than amazon.com.be ; I also never saw any organisation or company advertising the sales of subdomains under com.be ...

 

[Future Sensors]

someone has to own the domain com.be

 

[AniMeshorer]

Aha, odd I could not retrieve those data before. I researched it, but couldn't find any info on who owned com.be.

This means Amazon has full control over the domain com.be and the subdomains created under that.

That means that they will either reserve the domain only for themselves (which would mean amazon.com.be would be the only subdomain used), or they could choose to start selling subdomains of com.be to any interested party (the same way CentralNIC registers subdomains under uk.com, us.com, eu.com, etc)

 

[qtechnames]

These days Amazon heavily advertises in Belgian media. They use the amazon.com.be URL in their commercials.

This is odd. Belgium only has one nationwide ccTLD, and that is .be proper. The registry does not operate any third-level domain sales. This means someone has to own the domain com.be and create subdomains under that domain. Amazon uses such a subdomain.

However, it is totally unclear to me who owns this domain, and if the owner allows the registration of other subdomains under com.be?

As a lot of good names are already taken with .be proper, .com.be domains could be useful as long as the subdomains are registered by a stable organisation that sells those subdomains for a low price (it wouldn't make sense if a subdomain of com.be would be more expensive than a .be domain proper).

I am from Belgium, and never saw another .com.be in use other than amazon.com.be ; I also never saw any organisation or company advertising the sales of subdomains under com.be ...

That’s an interesting observation! I also haven’t seen many .com.be domains in use. It does make you wonder who owns the com.be domain and what kind of policy they have for subdomains.

 

[AniMeshorer]

That’s an interesting observation! I also haven’t seen many .com.be domains in use. It does make you wonder who owns the com.be domain and what kind of policy they have for subdomains.

Well, Amazon owns it. So either they can decide to only reserve it for their own use (in which case amazon.com.be would be the only active URL using .com.be) or they could decide to sell subdomains of com.be and earn some decent money with it.
I'm not sure if I'd really trust Amazon as a (sub)domain registrar though.

It's a shame that com.be ended up in the hands of Amazon. We (Belgium) should have reserved domains like com.be so that no random commercial entity could register it. Although I see in Europe this type of thing is not so uncommon. The subdomains sold under co.nl are also done by a private registrar, so the co.nl domain is also owned by a company. Idem with co.no where a company that owns the domain sells subdomains. I think co.dk and co.cz are in the same boat, but I am not 100% sure of that.

Anyways, Belgium should have reserved domains like com.be ; then it's up to the registry (possibly in negotiation with the government) to decide what to do with that domain. But seeing it falling into the hands of Amazon is about the worst that could have happened with such a good domain

 

[Future Sensors]

It's a shame that com.be ended up in the hands of Amazon. We (Belgium) should have reserved domains like com.be so that no random commercial entity could register it. Although I see in Europe this type of thing is not so uncommon. The subdomains sold under co.nl are also done by a private registrar, so the co.nl domain is also owned by a company. Idem with co.no where a company that owns the domain sells subdomains. I think co.dk and co.cz are in the same boat, but I am not 100% sure of that.

Yes, there are a lot of these.

https://www.namepros.com/articles/d...domain-registrations.1357325/#comment-9426031