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Belgium BIPT + GBA Sender Rules

Belgium (BE) is the bilingual Benelux market whose rules split across two regulators instead of one. The telecom side sits with the BIPT (Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications), which applies the sender-identification provisions of the Telecom Act of 13 June 2005 to traffic terminating on Belgian networks. The data-protection and ePrivacy side sits with the GBA (Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit, Autorité de protection des données), which enforces the GDPR alongside Article XII of the Code of Economic Law (CEL/WER) — including the Art. XII.13 opt-in regime for electronic marketing communications. Over both, the same Code maintains the Ne m’appelez pas / Bel-me-niet do-not-call register that governs voice outreach. This page expands the BE row of the country-requirements matrix so you can close the Belgian items deliberately instead of re-reading one JSON blob per launch. Belgium is a tenant-owned burden. Orbit never mandates your posture — it keeps the country-rules reference that feeds the send-time gates, and it gives you the consent ledger, sender-registration, quiet-hours, and opt-out surfaces below. The legal posture is yours. The Dutch/French split makes two decisions market-typical here: which language your opt-out instruction is written in, and which STOP vocabulary you confirm before launch. Both are configuration choices this page walks through.
This page is documentation, not legal advice. The GBA enforces the GDPR and the Code of Economic Law’s ePrivacy provisions against the sender, with administrative fines up to the GDPR ceilings, and Belgian operators police sender identification at the carrier edge. Have counsel review your consent capture and your French and Dutch message wording; Orbit supplies the surfaces.

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The two regulators — BIPT for telecom, GBA for data protection

BIPT (telecom). The BIPT is Belgium’s federal regulator for postal services and electronic communications, and the Telecom Act of 13 June 2005 is the statute it applies. For A2P SMS the provision that touches you is sender identification: traffic into Belgian networks must carry an identifiable originator, and the Belgian operators apply that expectation at their own edges. When a sender dispute or a deliverability question has a telecom flavour, it lands here. GBA (data protection). The GBA — Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit in Dutch, Autorité de protection des données in French — is Belgium’s data-protection authority. It enforces the GDPR alongside Book XII of the Code of Economic Law, whose Art. XII.13 gates electronic marketing communications behind prior consent. The consent record behind every BE marketing send has to survive GBA examination: a lawful basis, a timestamp, and a source the recipient would recognise. When a complaint arrives, it is the GBA that reads your ledger. The split is why Belgium needs two ledgers kept straight: the sender behaviour answers to the BIPT side and the operators, the consent and suppression evidence answers to the GBA side.

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The live country-rules lookup for BE

Read the BE row of GET /api/v1/compliance/country-rules?channel=sms (see Country Compliance Requirements). The live row is the send-time truth; this page documents the posture behind it.
Read sender_types, registration, content_restrictions, and stop_requirement from the BE row before every launch. The BE row currently accepts alphanumeric sender IDs with registration level none — no statutory registry holds your traffic at an Orbit gate — and carries the operator caveat this page expands: Belgian operators may relabel or override unregistered sender IDs, so the absence of a platform gate is not the absence of a carrier expectation. A registry refresh can raise a row’s registration level (never lower it), so the row you read today is the one the gate enforces tomorrow.

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Sender-ID acceptance across Proximus, Telenet, and Orange BE

Belgium has no statutory sender-ID register of the Indian DLT or Australian ACMA kind. What Belgium has is three operator edges — Proximus, Telenet, and Orange BE — that each expect an alphanumeric sender ID into +32 to resolve to an originator they can identify, and that may relabel or override a sender they cannot. That is the operator caveat the live row carries: the filtering you hit without the groundwork is deliverability, not an Orbit gate. The groundwork that carries the convention is the brand-to-sender pairing your operator or aggregator files on your behalf, naming the brand behind the alphanumeric ID. The tenant-owned control that carries it in Orbit is the Sender-ID Registration submit-and-track flow — file the BE sender there with the brand authorisation attached, and treat the approval state as a launch blocker for BE marketing traffic even while the live row’s registration level stays none. Orbit records the filing and the approval; the operator relationship itself sits with you and your provider.

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Marketing opt-in under Code of Economic Law Art. XII.13

CEL Art. XII.13 is Belgium’s opt-in regime for electronic marketing communications: consent before the send, never after, and the narrow existing-customer exception reads the way other ePrivacy implementations read it — it covers similar products or services of the same undertaking, not a new marketing relationship. The GBA reads silence, bundled consent, and pre-ticked boxes the way its European peers read them — they do not establish consent. For BE-bound marketing SMS the statute stack runs:
  • GDPR — lawful basis and provable consent for the processing behind the send. Record it the way the GDPR Posture Guide describes.
  • CEL Art. XII.13 — Belgium’s own ePrivacy-layer addition: marketing by electronic communications is lawful only with the recipient’s prior consent.
  • Withdrawal symmetry — an opt-out must be as easy as the opt-in and must stop the traffic. A French or Dutch opt-out reply fires the alias rule and writes a suppression entry scoped to all, so ARRÊT knocks the recipient off SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS in one event.
The consent record has to exist before the first marketing send and be provable on complaint. Give every record the fields the GBA will ask for:
  • the timestamp the recipient opted in (the consent-granted-at value),
  • the channel scope (sms for BE marketing SMS),
  • the language the recipient consented in — this is the field that makes the section below a lookup instead of a guess,
  • the source text the recipient saw at capture, in that same language,
  • the proof pointer you export when counsel asks.
Record it in Consent Management before the first dispatch, and export it with timestamps from Archival Export when the GBA or counsel asks.

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Multi-lingual STOP coverage

Belgium’s three official languages make the opt-out vocabulary a decision, not a default. The seeded alias table already ships the families you need: Matching happens on the inbound reply, so the two strategies differ only in what your outbound copy says:
  • Pick per-recipient language (recommended). Where the consent record carries the language, send the opt-out instruction in that language — “Répondez STOP pour vous désinscrire” for FR recipients, “Antwoord STOP om je uit te schrijven” for NL recipients — and add STOPP coverage for the German-speaking East Cantons if you send there. The seeded families already match whatever the recipient types back.
  • Blast all three. Where the language is unknown, keep all three seeded families live on the tenant and write the opt-out line trilingually. Coarser copy, zero language guesswork. The alias table’s custom additions are additive-only, so leaving the three families enabled never weakens the English STOP family — see Opt-Out Keyword Alias Table for the seeded set, the scope each alias writes, and how additions behave.
Whichever strategy you pick, confirm each family writes the suppression entry scoped to all, exactly like the English STOP family, and scrub against it — see Opt-Out Suppression. The Netherlands page covers the NL half of the Dutch family’s home market, and the France page the FR half; Belgium is where both run in one tenant.

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The Belgian do-not-call register for voice

The SMS sections above do not cover voice. For calls, the Code of Economic Law maintains the Ne m’appelez pas / Bel-me-niet do-not-call register — one list, two names, one per language community — and a consumer registered on it may not be called for direct marketing. This is the Belgian counterpart of the registers the DNC scrub page walks through for other markets: Orbit does not hold the Belgian list for you, and nothing on the platform scrubs it on your behalf by default. Import the register’s covered numbers into your suppression posture, scrub every BE voice audience against it before each campaign, and keep the scrub evidence exportable — the tenant owns the list currency and the audit trail.

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Quiet hours

Belgium has no statutory no-send window for marketing SMS the way France’s 20:00–08:00 rule is statutory. What Belgium has is a market convention that mirrors the neighbouring strict regimes — the French statutory window and the German 21:00–09:00 guidance — and a GBA complaint pattern that prices evening and early-morning marketing traffic accordingly. The tenant-owned control is the same deliberate opt-in as every other strict market: Where BE differs from FR: France’s window is statutory and surfaces in the country-rules content_restrictions; Belgium’s is convention plus a complaint pattern. Both end at the same configuration — you set tenant quiet hours deliberately — but nothing BE-specific appears in the rules row to remind you, so this page does.

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Where each BE obligation maps in Orbit

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BE launch checklist

Narrowed from the generic launch checklist in Country Compliance Requirements to the BE row:
1

Look up the BE row

Call GET /api/v1/compliance/country-rules?channel=sms&region=EU and read the BE row’s sender_types, registration, content_restrictions, and stop_requirement.
2

File the alphanumeric sender

Submit the BE sender with the brand authorisation through Sender-ID Registration; Proximus, Telenet, and Orange BE each relabel senders they cannot identify.
3

Capture marketing opt-in first

Record a consent entry with sms scope — timestamp, language, source text, proof pointer — before any BE marketing send; CEL Art. XII.13 is opt-in, not opt-out. See Consent Management and the GDPR Posture Guide.
4

Wire the trilingual STOP families

Confirm the FR (ARRÊT), NL (STOPPEN, UITSCHRIJVEN), and DE (STOPP) families are mapped in the alias table and write the suppression entry scoped to all; choose per-recipient language or the trilingual blast. See Opt-Out Keyword Alias Table.
5

Scrub the suppression ledger and the DNC register

Scrub the BE audience against the suppression ledger before each launch, and for voice campaigns against the imported Ne m’appelez pas / Bel-me-niet register via DNC Scrubbing.
6

Set tenant quiet hours deliberately

If you run BE marketing traffic, turn on tenant quiet hours over Europe/Brussels recipient time, mirroring the neighbouring 21:00–09:00 convention — Orbit defaults this off. See Quiet-Hours Configuration.
7

Launch

With BE enabled on the tenant, the sender filed, consent captured, keywords wired, the ledgers scrubbed, and quiet hours set, start sending.