Entries tagged with “France” from Domains / Internet Technology News - DNS News

AFNIC, the body that runs .fr, is currently conducting a survey about people's views on the .fr domain extension.

The survey covers a number of areas including people's perception of .fr and what kind of services they expect to get with a .fr domain name.

UPDATE: It transpires that the survey was not meant to be public!

AFNIC, which runs the .fr registry, has published its Action Plan for 2010.

While the "old chestnut" of DNSSEC is on the agenda (no surprise there!), there's also reference to a change in the registration rules.

Under the current registration rules registrants need to supply an address in France.
The proposed change is intended to open up registration to all French nationals regardless of their place of residence.

So does this leave the door open for a wider change?

Are we likely to see non-French nationals being able to register .fr domains without having to "jump through hoops"?

The current situation is more than a little frustrating. If a non-French company or individual wants to register a .fr domain, regardless of their motives, the registry rules render the registration incredibly difficult. While other ccTLD registries may have restrictive rules, in most instances there are relatively "sane" ways to navigate them.

It's not clear from the document that has been published what the registry's exact plans are in this area, but any change and progress in this area should be welcomed.

According to the document the plan would need to be voted on by the board in November.

The original text is available via the AFNIC site.

The Mayor of Paris was very upbeat about the new TLD project when he spoke during the ICANN meeting in Paris. Not surprisingly Paris is one of the European cities that is pushing hard to get its own tld .paris.

According to news released earlier today the .paris bid is going to be using a combination of AFNIC and CORE.

AFNIC already runs the .fr cctld operations, while CORE runs .cat's operations.

More here

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Who needs new gTLDs when you can grab your own ccTLD!

Last year I noticed a trend in the ccTLD world, with a lot of governments and interest groups taking an interest in governance of their namespaces.

AFNIC, which runs .fr and several other cctlds, came under review from the French government.

Less than a year later the French government has put the registry management out to tender.

Interested parties have 52 days from the announcement, which was made on January 15th, to submit their proposals.

The winning bidder will get the contract for an initial period of 7 years.

So who is likely to place a bid?

Presumably AFNIC, who currently manage the namespace, will be in there, but there are bound to be others. Antony Van Couvering hints at COCCA making a play for it, while Afilias and several others may also be interested in getting a pitch in.

The IEDR has obviously released some form of press release in the last few days to put a spin on its latest figures. Of course the press release isn't on the registry's website nor has it been sent to stakeholders yet again, though I was able to get my hands on a copy of it via a 3rd party.

So what are they trying to sell us today?

The IE Domain Registry (IEDR) today reported a 23% jump in the net number of .ie websites registered in Ireland in Q3 compared to the same period last year.
 
The growing number of companies and sole traders moving their business operations online and choosing to do so with a .ie website is one of the main reasons for the rise, in addition to five consecutive years of price reductions by the IEDR, which has made it more affordable for businesses to do so. The cost of registering a .ie domain has fallen by over 60% since 2003.

There are two serious issues with that section of their statement.
The price that the IEDR is referring to is the wholesale price NOT the retail price. The retail price is set by the registrars not the registry and for the registry to make these kind of comments about pricing is inappropriate. Other registry operators would not make comments about their registrars pricing policies, so why should the IEDR?
To claim that the price has fallen is misleading, as the fall in price / cost will only have affected the registrars not the registrants. For the registry to make allusions to pricing in this manner suggests that they are in some way influencing the retail pricing

 
The latest figures from the IEDR, the managed registry for Ireland's official internet address .ie, show that new registrations were up by almost a fifth with 8,197 .ie websites registered in the period July to September 2008.

If the figures are official why aren't they published openly on the IEDR's site?

Why must they insist on referring to themselves as "the managed registry" without ever explaining what they are managing?

Registrations rose by 20.3% representing a substantial increase on figures from the same period last year, when 6,813 .ie website registrations were recorded. The increase also means the total number of .ie websites registered in Ireland now exceeds 110,000, just four months after the 100,000th barrier was broken earlier in May this year.
 
Of the .ie websites registered in Q3 83.3% of those were registered by corporate bodies and sole traders while personal domains blogs and other non-commercial websites, accounted for 2.5% of the registrations, placing Ireland on a par with the level of uptake recorded for other country code top level domains.  

Based on what criteria exactly? Claiming that Ireland is "on a par" with other countries is fine, but can they actually cite any real figures to support that claim?

Only 2.5% of IE domains are used by non-business users according to their statistics, but there is no explanation of why this is the case. There's no comparison between Ireland and other countries in this regard either.

If you were to compare IE registrations with FR registrations, for example, I somehow doubt that IE would come out looking so well. Unlike Ireland the French registry doesn't put silly barriers in the way of legitimate registrations.

For the first time this quarter the IEDR has also made multiyear registrations available to resellers for a period of 2 - 10 years, thus enabling .ie resellers to register and secure a .ie domain for several years at a time. The IEDR plans to extend this service by Q1 by offering resellers the option of multiyear renewals.

Wouldn't publishing data related to this change have been a bit more newsworthy?
The public won't understand or care what a "reseller" is in this context.
The introduction of multi-year registrations is a positive move, but the lack of multiyear renewals seriously hampers its effectiveness and causes headaches.

Commenting on the 20% rise in .ie registrations, Mr. David Curtin, Chief Executive of IE Domain Registry, said; "This has been another very strong quarter for the IEDR and one we expect to see continue into Q4, when it is predicted that the number of .ie domains registered will exceed the 115,000 mark by year end. Our reseller community, in particular, has been instrumental in driving registrations again this year and as broadband rollout and download speeds continue to improve, we expect to see more companies and SMEs, in particular, availing of .ie as a secure local online environment in which to do business".

Curtin should get an award of some kind for fluffy meaningless statements.

If the IEDR actually cared about their resellers they would actually communicate with them, but they obviously don't.

The reseller community drives registrations and basically keeps the IEDR and its staff in jobs, yet the IEDR do not care enough about the registrars / resellers to even bother sharing press releases with them - we have to find out from a 3rd party.

And of course nowhere in the press release is there any mention of Comreg, the extended registry downtime over the past few weeks or any of their inane proposals, such as the policy board that would not have any registrar representation.

Stephane mentioned the sales of auto.fr and voitures.fr, which are two premium names, being dictionary terms.

What's interesting about these sales is that both names were supposedly bought by the same buyer and that they have set a new record for .fr sales.

While porn.fr may have sold for €30k, auto.fr went for €100k via Sedo and voitures.fr fetched a very respectable €50k.

So cars are worth more in France than sex?

Possibly. Who knows?

There must be something in the air. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but there are a lot of things going on in the ccTLD world at the moment.

In the UK Nominet's AGM is being held this week. This would normally provoke a yawn from most people - it's an AGM - how exciting can that be? This year's AGM looks like it could be quite entertaining, although it probably isn't going to be particularly beneficial for its membership.

Over the last few weeks the private members' mailing list has been a veritable battleground. While some "healthy" discussion prior to an AGM and the election of various people might be expected, the activity over the past few weeks has gone from the sublime to the absolutely insane.

It seems to have all started shortly after the PAB election results were announced, though anyone trying to follow the tit for tat bickering may be excused for not being able to provide a concise timeline.

The board election debacle came to a head a few days ago when Nominet issued a warning to its members about their voting in the AGM. This of course led to even more debate and back and forth, which has probably confused quite a few people. There is, of course, a discussion (or two) on Acorn Domains.
A lot of the "action" seems to centre around "resolution 6", which members are meant to vote on at the AGM. The more vocal members seem to have split into two camps. You can read the opposing views here and here.

At the same time as some of Nominet's members are involved in a catfight the new gTLDs, which ICANN are supposedly introducing, came into the public eye again, with a new dotEng campaign being launched. I already mentioned the Scottish campaign for a .sco.

In Ireland the IEDR, which is the body responsible for the IE ccTLD, was subject to an external audit before Christmas. While the Irish Communications regulator (Comreg) had made promises of delivering a report to both stakeholders and the public nothing has been forthcoming to date. In the same period the Irish ccTLD topped the 100k name mark.

Over in France AFNIC is coming under fire, as the French communications regulator has opened up a consultation on who should be managing the French ccTLD and related entities that cater for the DOMTOM. It's an odd move on the French government's part, as AFNIC has always had state representation. Could we see .fr being run by a non-French company?
AFNIC are being quite gracious about the whole affair and issued a statement welcoming the process earlier this week, but who is to know what is going on behind closed doors...

And if that wasn't enough Denmark's ccTLD, .dk, is also coming under scrutiny. The dotDK group is tendering to run the registry, as they feel that the current system is far from ideal. Having dealt with DK Hostmaster's rather convoluted domain activation system I can't really argue with them!
What makes the dotDK project interesting for ICANN watchers is that Tina Dam, who has been working for ICANN for the last few years, is one of the main people involved. Francesco's article covers some of this in more detail.

And you thought ICANN was exciting?

The .fr registry (AFNIC) had a milestone a few days ago.

They've now got over one million domains registered!

While that may seem like a significant number it pales in comparison to the figure of DENIC or Nominet. However, if you compare .fr to one of its European neighbours like Ireland, with barely 90k domains it's still impressive.

The bizarre thing is that AFNIC didn't bother informing registrars of the milestone. (Or if they did we didn't get the email!)

(I work for an AFNIC member company)