French domains to open up to Europe

FRANCE is looking at opening up its restrictions on who can hold a .fr internet domain name.

Until now it has only been possible to register a .fr domain name if the company or individual was based in France, or held a French trademark.

Domain name registrar Association française pour le nommage Internet en coopération (Afnic) has asked people to join its consultation on its proposal to allow companies and individuals in the rest of the EU to have a French domain name.

Afnic plans to open its register by 2011 to companies and individuals from any EU country.

The change comes after industry minister Christian Estrosi set Afnic deadlines to change its operations. The first, which was to be done inside two weeks, was to allow French people living outside France to register .fr domains. The second was to open up to Europe: it was given two years to do that.

French domains have been very heavily regulated as part of Afnic’s aim of hosting the “internet with confidence”. It has led to .fr domains being specific to France and being backed up with owner records in the country.

Originally companies could only register domain names all-but identical to their trade names. While this was swept away in 2004, it has left a market where internet users opted for top-level generic domain names such as .com

However, regulations also meant people could not buy names secondhand and Afnic would refuse to approve a change of registration if there was a suspicion the seller had been paid to give up a name.

In effect, there was no market in reselling names, and little appreciation of the value of a domain name: in 2003, hostels.fr sold for €1,100 while hostels.com went for €3 million.

It meant firms put little value on their website; some are happy to spend €60,000 on a national newspaper advert, but will not spend €20,000 on a website.

Valuable domain name are still not taken up: www.mulberry.fr has not yet been taken up by the UK fashion house in the land of fashion.