.fr opens up rules, also for .fr, .re, .yt, .pm, .wf and .tf

The .fr-registry (AFNIC) announced that, from December 6th onwards, the rules for registering a .fr domain name will be relaxed. At this point in time, you are required to either live in France or have a French Trade Mark before you can register a .fr domain name. With the new rules, anyone within the European Union will be allowed to register a .fr domain name.

In practice this won’t change too much for end-users, since most .fr registrars were already offering so called “local presence” or “trustee” service, which basically by-passes the strict rules by registering the names in name of a French contact of the registrar and thus enabling people and companies from outside of France to already register their .fr domain name.

The new rules will however mean a big change for some other TLD’s that are also managed by AFNIC. The new rules will also be applied to the following TLD’s:

• .re: The extension for La Réunion, which is an island with a population of about 800,000 people and is located in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. Registrations under .re are now only allowed to people living on La Réunion.
• .yt: The extension for Mayotte. Also an island in the Indian Ocean. Population is about 200.000 people. Right now, registrations under .yt are not possible.
• .pm: The TLD for Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a group of small islands in the North Atlantic Ocean with less then 10.000 in habitants. Also for this TLD, registrations were previously not possible. There might turn out to be some interest in the new TLD once it becomes available, since “PM” is an abbreviation that can mean a number of things. Modules written in the programming language Perl use .pm as there file extension. But it’s also used for “Product Management”, “Private Message” and obviously it also is used to indicate that a certain hour is in the afternoon.
• .wf: Wallis and Futuna, situated in the South Pacific near Tuvalu, which is best known for it’s TLD .tv and the fact that it might sink under sea level due to sea levels rising. Also .wf will be new to the market.
• .tf: French Southern and Antarctic Lands which actually has no permanent population next to military personnel, scientific researchers and support staff.

AFNIC is currently still preparing the full information and actual rules that will be applied. Pricing for these TLD’s should be similar to that of a .fr domain name. It looks like December 6’th will be an old-fashioned first-come first-served landrush for these TLD’s, although it is not clear if a big interest will be shown.

From the documentation that AFNIC released until now, it is however very clear that they are still ironing out the latest issues. In the latest version, the TLD .yt for Mayotte was wrongly written as .my (which actually is the domain name extension of Malaysia, which hasn’t got anything to do with AFNIC) So things might probably still change before this goes live.