How the Netherlands took to the Internet

RNW, 25 April 2011, By Heleen Sittig

(Photo: Flickr/Alan Light)

People in this country visit Dutch sites and Dutch versions of foreign sites every day and never stop to think about it. That little .nl at the end of the URLs was one of the first country domains. “Dot nl” has existed since 1986 and, in fact, celebrates its 25th anniversary today.

RNW spoke to Piet Beertema, one of the small group of visionaries who applied for the national domain name. “1986 seems a long time ago. Was there even internet back then?”

“No. Not for Europeans, anyway.” The internet did exist, but only as a network of computers in the United States.

“We were hoping to get connected, but we were still in the Cold War years. The Americans regarded Europe as a region you couldn’t fully trust, so the chances didn’t look too good. However, we had built our own network in Europe, which consisted of between 20 and 25,000 computers by the end of 1985.”

Hooking up

The Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (Centre for Mathematics & Information Science) where Beertema worked was the central hub of the European computer network, EUnet. Its website cwi.nl, which still exists, was the first ever “dot nl” site.

The World Wide Web (WWW) did not exist at the time and the network was used for two things: e-mails and news groups. Sending a mail was a little more complicated than it is now.

“If you wanted to send an e-mail to Australia, it would probably have to pass through five to ten computers and each one in the chain had to phone the next one. It could take half a day or even 24 hours before your message arrived.”

In the late 1980s, the ball started rolling and all Dutch universities were soon linked to the internet. However, the pioneers still had no idea that the internet would someday be part of the daily lives of millions of people.

“Data was transferred at the rate of 30 bits per second using conventional phone lines, which made it really expensive. Transatlantic phone connections cost around two euros a minute and it seemed clear that it would never be something for the masses.”

In the vanguard

The Netherlands was not only one of the first countries with its own domain name, but also one where internet spread faster than elsewhere. A lot of people use internet and there are a large number of .nl sites. More than 4.4 million are active at present and that number is increasing by 2,700 a day. “Dot nl” is now the third largest country domain in the world, after .de (Germany) and .uk (United Kingdom).

Willem Velthoven, founder of Mediamatic, an organisation for new media, art and society, has his own theory as to why the Netherlands has been in the forefront for so long.

“The Netherlands is generally a country which uses media a great deal. It’s not something which has only developed recently. Hundreds of years ago it was a place where publishers thrived. They published books for other countries too – for the Arab world, where book printing was actually banned for a while – and for France where political and sexually explicit writing was banned. The enthusiasm for media is a long and still strong tradition in the Netherlands.”