Websites blocked in Belgium

The precise number of websites blocked in Belgium is unknown. Blocking may vary from one Internet Service Provider (ISP) to another with some sites blocked by some ISPs and not by others.

Site blocks in Belgium are at this moment only based on DNS Hijacking and can be trivially circumvented using third party DNS public servers, Tor, the Pirate Browser version of Tor, VPNs, site specific and general web proxies, and other circumvention techniques.

Verification

There is no official complete register of blocked sites. Blocked content includes:

• Court orders (mainly for copyright issues)
• Unilateral blocking (some websites have been reported as being blocked without any known court order on the sole initiative of certain ISPs)
• Gambling regulations (Belgian gambling laws requires a Gambling business to have a local physical gambling point and proper license in order to provide online gambling)^[1]

The only reported technique used by Belgian ISPs to block such websites is DNS Hijacking where requests toward the blocked websites would be redirected to a government owned web page: the "StopPage".^{[2 1][2]}

Court-ordered blocked websites

These are the sites explicitly listed and blocked by court cases in Belgium.

Site name	Domain or URL	Type of site	Reason	ISPs in Court Case	Blocked By[3]	Start date	Resolution date
The Pirate Bay	thepiratebay.se thepiratebay.org thepiratebay.net thepiratebay.com thepiratebay.nu piratebay.org piratebay.net piratebay.se piratebay.no jimkeyser.se ripthepiratebay.com	Torrent Indexer	Copyright[4]	Belgacom Telenet	Proximus Telenet Numericable[1 1] Mobistar[1 1] Voo	November 2011[4][5][6][7]

Notes

1. It is important to note that despite the fact that only two ISPs were actually concerned in this court order, many other ISPs have implemented the same blocking without any specific court order. It is not fully known which ISPs decided to enforce this ruling or not.

Unilaterally blocked websites

These are the sites blocked by some ISPs in Belgium without any known related court-order. It is believed that these blockings are the result of pressure by the Belgian Anti-piracy Federation (BAF)^{[2 2]} who threatened ISPs of heavy legal fees should they not comply with their request.^{[8][9][10][11]} The list of ISPs below is probably incomplete as each ISP can decide individually on the matter.

Case name	Domain or URL	Type of site	Reason	Blocked by[3]	Start date	Resolution date
The Pirate Bay	thepiratebay.se depiraatbaai.be	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Numericable Telenet Voo	December 2011[12]
IsoHunt	isohunt.com	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Numericable Telenet Voo	unknown	Site moved to new domain in October 2013[13]
KickAssTorrents	kat.ph kickass.to	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Numericable Telenet Voo	August 2013[14]
BitSnoop	bitsnoop.com	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Telenet Voo	August 2013[14]
ExtraTorrent	extratorrent.cc	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Telenet Voo	August 2013[14]
h33t	h33t.com	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Numericable Telenet Voo	August 2013[14]	Site moved to new domain in December 2013[15]
monova	monova.org	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Telenet Voo	unknown
TorrentReactor	torrentreactor.net	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Numericable Telenet Voo	unknown
TorrentHound	torrenthound.com	Torrent Indexer	Copyright	Proximus Mobistar Telenet Voo	unknown
YifySubtitles	yifysubtitles.com	Movie Subtitles	Copyright	Proximus	Februari 2016

Gambling regulations blocked websites

The list of blocked gambling websites is the only official publicly available and maintained blocklist in Belgium. The list is available on the official Belgian Gaming Commission website.^{[16][2 3]}

Links

1. "StopPage".
2. anti-piracy.be
3. gamingcommission.be

References

1. "LOI - WET".
2. "Belgian Court of Appeal prefers DNS blocking over IP blocking".
3. Source : DNS Lookups on ISP DNS Servers
4. "Official Court Report" (PDF) (in Dutch). nurba.be. 4 October 2011.
5. "Belgian ISP ordered to block The Pirate Bay". yro.slashdot.org. 4 October 2011.
6. "Pirate Bay encourages filesharers to dodge Belgium block". news.techworld.com. 6 October 2011.
7. "Belgian ISPs vs Internet Freedom". eff.org. 7 December 2011.
8. "BAF Letter to ISPs" (PDF) (in French). nurpa.be. 17 November 2011.
9. "BAF Letter to Belgian ISPs" (PDF) (in Dutch). nurpa.be. 17 November 2011.
10. "La BAF fait chanter les fournisseurs d'accès pour étendre la censure internet" (in French). nurpa.be. 5 December 2011.
11. "Les FAI belges invités à bloquer The Pirate Bay pour éviter les frais de justice" (in French). numerama.com. 6 December 2011.
12. "Les Fournisseurs d'accès internet étendent la censure, sans base légale" (in French). nurpa.be. 19 December 2011.
13. Samuel Gibbs. "Isohunt BitTorrent search engine clone back online". the Guardian.
14. "Belgian ISPs quietly expand torrent site blockade". torrentfreak.com. 28 August 2013.
15. "h33t online after several months downtime". torrentfreak.com. 10 December 2013.
16. "Pagina - Commission des jeux de Hasard".