The Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation and Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen officially opened the website de25jaarvan.nl to celebrate 25 years of the .NL (Netherlands) ccTLD at a launch ceremony in The Hague in February.
âIn the last quarter-century, the simple abbreviation â.NLâ has become a factor of considerable economic significance. The internet is now the source of innovation and one of the drivers of our economy,â Mr Verhagen wrote.
One of the jubilee websiteâs functions is as a repository for anecdotes from Dutch people, describing the impact that the internet has had on their lives, and on the life of their country, in the last twenty-five years.
For the first twenty-five hours of de25jaarvan.nl, every hour another prominent Dutch personality made a contribution to the site. Each of them will add to the websiteâs timeline with words or images reflecting his or her personal experience of the internet.
Among the celebrities and public figures who will be contributing are Hanna Verboom (actress and founder of Get It Done), Frank Heemskerk (former State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Chairman of ECP-EPN), Jacco Eltingh (former tennis professional) and Raymond Spanjar (founder of Hyves).
The personal recollections and reflections include a piece by Frans Nauta, describing .NL as âThe perfect Albert Cuyp market for a Dutch ideas stall. As it has been for twenty-five years!â Boris van der Ham points out that âThe internet has opened up political parties. They are now able to communicate with people more quickly and are more accessible.â Ot van Daalen opens his blog entry with the words, âFor the last twenty-five years, every time that a Dutch person has accessed the net for the first time, the world has got a little smaller and a little better.â
History
On 25 April 1986, the .NL domain became one of the worldâs first country-code domains to be delegated to a body outside the USA. That body was the CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Informatics). Driving force behind the delegation was Piet Beertema, who then worked at the CWI.
âIn those days, if youâd suggested that before long there would be an internet connection in every living room, people would have thought you were mad. Apart from anything else, the connections were far too expensive and too slow to be suitable. Nowadays, even small children are able to surf the net or have their own homepages,â Beertema observed.
Since its introduction, the ccTLD has developed into the fourth biggest country-code domains in the world, with 4.2 million active domain names. In 2010 alone, the number of .NL domains rose by half a million. The very first .NL domain name was cwi.nl which remains active to this day. In 1996, Piet Beertema, Ted Lindgreen and Boudewijn Neederkoorn set up SIDN and control of the .NL domain was passed on to the new organisation. As well as being very successful in terms of size, the .NL domain is one of the most secure top-level domains in existence.
To register your .NL domain name, check out Europe Registry here.