AFNIC considers IDN

Afnic (.fr registry) considers to start offering IDN domain names. IDN names, Internationalised Domain Names, are names which also contain non-Latin characters such as é, è, î,…

Since the French language contains lots of words with accents, it isn’t so strange Afnic is considering this option. Currently the registry is carrying out a survey amongst their registrars to check how many interest there would be for such domain names.

The .fr registry isn’t the only registry considering this idea, also DNS.be (.be registry) is thinking about this option. For other extensions such as .eu, .lu and .com it’s already possible to register names which contain non-Latin characters. Other extensions even offer IDN extension, like for instance the .РФ-extension for Russia.