I have blogged earlier about a, now aborted, attempt by a group of extreme right activists and independentists to get hold of a ccTLD for Belgian Flanders.

A new attempt, by Flemish parliament member Mark Demesmaeker,  is on its way. As Mr Demesmaeker observes in his question to the flemish government, Flanders cannot get .vl because they do not have an ISO-3166 two letter code, and won’t get one “until it gets independent and not earlier” (Vlaanderen zal .vl krijgen als het onafhankelijk wordt en niet eerder).

This is why he suggests asking for .vla instead. This time, rather than extremist groups, it is the Flemish government itself which will be pursuing the project.

There is still some common background to the failed proposal and the new one, as one extrem right parliament member observed. Both see this as a first step towards political independence, rather than as a way to build a cultural community, like .cat did.  Mr Demesmaeker makes it clear in other posts on his blog that he wants Flanders to be a Flemings-only club. It must be heartbreaking for those independentists to be relegated to just ask for a gTLD, rather than the ccTLD they think they deserve.

I sent the following to my ISP today:

You may be aware that the available pool of IPv4 addresses will be exhausted in 3 years from now. Here are some links to more information.

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/ipv6/docs/european_day/communication_final_27052008_en.pdf

http://www.ripe.net/news/community-statement.html (and similar announcements form other RIRs)

By way of this e-mail, I wish to formally ask you to make IPv6 support available to your customers.

We are often told that ISPs do not deploy IPv6 on  their network because there is no user demand, so I thought it may be useful to formally ask for it and inform you that I am willing to pay a small extra for a decent IPv6 service.

My own blog post on the subject is here:
http://www.circleid.com/posts/85288_european_commission_pushes_ipv6/

I do not expect any answer, but if it happened, I would post it here.

Update 2 june 10:21am:  The ISP has closed the ticket, without even bothering to reply. Obviously “raising awareness” is  not enough. One of these days, I will have to vote with my feet. The problem of course is that most other Belgian ISPs are even worse …

Le ridicule ne tue plus, en tout cas pas chez mon fournisseur de gaz: Luminus. J’ai reçu de leur part reçu une facture de € 0,42 ! On aurait pu croire à un poisson d’avril, si ce n’était que le courrier est daté du 28 mars.

Y-a-t-il quelqu’un chez Luminus qui pourrait prendre le temps de calculer combien coûte le traitement d’un paiement électronique pour l’entreprise, la banque et le client ?

Le régulateur belge de télécoms, l’IBPT, prévoit d’obliger l’opérateur historique à proposer une offre ADSL2+ sur son infrastructure pour les fournisseurs d’accès Internet qui l’utilisent (soit désormais 100% du marché aux particuliers).

J’ai donc adressé le courrier suivant au régulateur :

Monsieur,

Concerne: Projet de decision du conseil de l’IBPT du 12 mars 2008 concernant BROBA 2008 ADSL2+

En tant que consommateur, je ne puis que vous encourager à continuer dans la voie de cette décision.

Au vu des expériences dans les pays voisins, l’ADSL2+ représente une réelle opportunité pour les consommateurs d’obtenir une réelle concurrence, et par voie de conséquence de meilleurs prix et service. Les tarifs actuellement pratiqués en Belgique sont largement supérieurs à nos voisins. Voir notamment:
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/doc/factsheets/13thimplementation/9-2-be.pdf

Il est important, d’un point de vue démocratique, qu’une gamme plus large d’utilisateurs aient la possibilité d’accéder à Internet. Le prix de l’abonnement est un des facteurs qui entre en ligne de compte.

Face à un opérateur qui a toujours du mal à renoncer à son monopole, il faut un régulateur déterminé. Et cela d’autant plus que Belgacom vient de mettre la main sur l’infrastructure de Scarlet, devenant donc, de facto, le seul opérateur d’infrastructure DSL en Belgique.

Avec mes plus sincères salutations.

I moved to Belgium some months ago and, as a result, I needed to take a new Internet access subscription. In the past, I complained a lot about the prices and lack of openness of the Luxembourg broadband market. Much to my surprise, the situation is worse in Belgium. Actually, not much has changed in the landscape over the last ten years, when I moved from Belgium to Luxembourg. The incumbent is still everywhere and keeps the market as closed as possible and the regulator seems quite toothless.

While the incumbent telecom operator, Belgacom, trumpets everywhere that it is at the forefront of fast Internet access, here’s what my ADSL modem actually shows:

Yes, you read well: 928 Kbit/s download speed, instead of the 4Mbit/s the operator offers. This was on a rainy day. On dry days, my speed increases to a whopping 1.5 Mbit, but still only 40% of the promised speed. I am 2.8 kilometers away from the local exchange, according to my ISP. Hence I should get better performance. The fact the speed varies according to weather conditions suggests to me that the cabling in the street ducts is not waterproof.

Actually, my ISP is not Belgacom. However, most ISPs use the Turboline ADSL infrastructure, which belongs to the incumbent, and just buy bit rate access from it. And the copper pairs belong to Belgacom, of course. I have now filed a ticket with my ISP to ask Belgacom to fix their line. Wait and see. I do not have much hope, though, and I think I will have to ultimately move to cable TV Internet instead. Too bad, because my ISP, Dommel, is one of the best in Belgium, offering generous monthly quotas (much to my astonishment, they still exist in Belgium) and no port blocking at all ( but, alas, no support for IPv6).

The other week, I called Belgacom about their Belgacom TV IPTV service. When I pointed out the lack of bandwidth, I was informed they could upgrade me to new VDSL2 service, but only if I subscribed to their IPTV service. In the meantime, Belgacom does all it can to prevent competitors to offer services on its VDSL2 network, although this was mandated by the regulator, IBPT. A clear case of abuse of dominant power.

It is also well known that the incumbent does not invest much in the Southern part of Belgium, preferring instead to focus on areas where it has strong competition, namely Flanders, where the cable TV operator, Telenet, is taking large chunks of the residential market by offering triple play services. Let us hope that the now unified Wallonia cable TV network, Voo, also offering triple play, will bring more competition and hopefully better prices and services.

Last Tuesday, a speed camera in a nearby Belgian town saw a car with my car plate driving at 105km/h where speed was limited to 50 Km/h. The problem is: at that time, I was at my office in Luxembourg, 50 kilometers away from the road where the picture was taken.

I have enough witnesses who can testify I was at the office and I trust the Belgian courts to finally come up to the conclusion it was not me, but rather someone who copied my car plate. This being said, this identity theft is the source of a lot of complications and it will cost me some time in the coming weeks in all sorts of paperwork. And I will not get compensated for the loss of time, money, etc.

Car plates, especially the Belgian ones, are easy to copy,  enough to fool a speed camera. They are by no means a reliable way to identify a car, much less a driver, just like e-mail addresses are not a reliable way to identify the real sender. For e-mail, we added things like S/MIME, PGP and DKIM to somehow make the process more trustable.

What could be done for cars ? Could we inbed RFID chips in the car so it can be traced by these cameras ? On the other hand, there have been reports that RFID chips are easy to crack and reprogram.

According to Google, the Belgian Official Journal may harm your computer …

Arlon (Belgium) – for immediate release

The Next Net is pleased to announce the appointment of Betty, as its new Chief Gardening Officer. The appointment is effective September 14, 2007.

Ms. Betty brings more than 3 months of experience from the agricultural and gardening sectors. As the descendant of Dizzy, she will build on her family assets. She was very early in her carreer trained to the inticraties of cleaning up orchards and meadows from brambles and nettles. Prior to her appointment, she was a trainee at a family farm near Bastogne (Belgium).

“This is a tremendous and important development for us,” said family chair Patrick Vande Walle. “Betty is a talented professional, who is well-equipped to clean up the orchard. She is determined to make our property look good. She will also be in charge of bleating the family out of bed on Sunday morning. We are thrilled to welcome Betty to our staff and look forward to her involvement”. Ms Betty will form a team with Mr Flea, the CEO (Chief Entertainement Officer), a Labrador retriever puppy, pictured right.

Ms. Betty, who is a Mini Doe (Capra aegagrus hircus), has a MGA (Masters degree in Garden cleaning Administration) and is an undergraduate in cheese making from Goat University. She bleats in her own language, but understands some French.

Press Contact : Patrick Vande Walle.
Personal interviews with the CGO and CEO can be arranged on request.

There is a some parallel that can be drawn between the current dispute on the .EH TLD for Western Sahara and the .VL application. In both cases, the process is being used for political purposes to serve a goal for autonomy or independence. I am not taking sides on the .EH issue, as I do not feel I have enough information to have a meaningful opinion. On .VL however, I think that the 20+ years I spent in Flanders can give me enough background.

In the case of the .VL, there is a public image, posted in English on the ICANN web site, and a quite different one posted in Dutch on the proponents web sites. Some translated extracts, for the benefit of those who do not understand Dutch:

Why a .VL, according their web site:

It is all about being recognized, mostly by the international community. Flanders does have foreign affairs responsibilities, but try to explain simply to Israël that Belgium is made of regions and communities and that you are the Minister of foreign affairs for Flanders and not for Belgium. A specific TLD would enhance the visibility of Flanders in the world, and this can only be positive.

It is clear here that this is about political visibility and not about spreading a culture, like .CAT does. Indeed, this is well in line with the political agenda of the proponents, the Jonge Vlamingen group, which states on their web site (potentially racist humor deleted from the text):

Jonge Vlamingen wishes to promote the separation of Flanders (ed: from Belgium)… We want to build a network where young Flemings who choose for Flemish independence can meet.

As has been explained in a previous post on the subject, other organizations supporting the project have a similar agenda.

My advice to the ICANN community, should this proposal be formalized, is to be aware of the fact they would actually be used to serve a political agenda, rather than a cultural one. The issue of regional autonomy (and now independence) has been on the Belgian political agenda for nearly a century. This is a very sensitive and complicated matter. ICANN would be well inspired not to join the mess.

Now that Catalonia got its .cat domain, other regions are coming up with similar requests. One of those is lead by a group of associations from the Belgian Flanders region, claiming a .VL top level domain. The Jonge Vlamingen association is a nationalist group wishing to make Flanders independent from Belgium.

However, among these associations are also several hate groups. Voorpost is well known for its pro-nazi sympathies and propaganda. The Nationalistische Studenten Vereniging is an extreme right student group. One of its former members was Filip Dewinter, the current president of the extrem right party Vlaams Belang (formerly Vlaams Blok). Those groups are known for their racist positions in Flanders (against the Turkish and Maghrebian minorities) and in Belgium in general for their intolerance against anyone not Flemish.

As for the Taal Aktie Komitee, I can testify I have been physically molested by some of its members because I dared speaking French to some of my friends in a street in Flanders. It was 25 years ago, but my back is still hurting on wet days because of that.

DomainNews.com reports that the Flemish group will team up with the applicants for .cym, .bzh and .gal GeoTLDs. A word of caution to the Welsh, Breton and Galician groups: watch out who you are teaming up with. Do you want racists and revisionists in your group ? If not, you should better think twice before teaming up with the current .VL team, unless they distance themselves from those embarrassing supporters. Actually, they do. Sort of. However, the disclaimer is quite vague:

“Het vermelden van en linken naar deze organisaties en hun website betekent niet dat Jonge Vlamingen en PUNT VL de standpunten van deze organisaties onderschrijven of akkoord zijn met de inhoud van hun website”.

The references and links to these organizations and their web site does not mean that Jonge Vlamingen en PUNT VL supports the positions of those organizations or agree to the contents of their web site.

So, it is not clear however which views they support and which they do not.

Update 20 August: The proponents of .VL point out on their web site (in Dutch) that French Réunion (.re), Guadeloupe (.gp), Martinique (.mq) and French Guyana (.gf) have their own ccTLD. However, none of these French departments or territories use this for the political purposes of separating themselves from their country, and their ccTLD is administered by AFNIC. They also point out to .EU.

They seem to ignore that all these entities have their own ISO-3166 codes. Flanders does not. And unless they convince the UN Statistics Division they are a sufficiently autonomous territory from an economical point of view or an independent state, the VL ISO code is not going to assigned to Flanders any time soon. With regard to ICANN’s policy on new TLDs, I think it would be dangerous for ICANN to assign two letter TLDs which could conflict with later updates to the ISO-3166 list.