As regular Anchovy News readers may know, applicants for domain names registered under the .FR country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) need to be based in the European Union, or in one of the following countries: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
As the United Kingdom has now left the EU, it is no longer possible for UK-based companies or individuals to register .FR domain names.
However, unlike EURid, the .EU domain name Registry, which has suspended over 81,000 .EU domain names held by UK-based registrants who had not updated their address to one in the EU (see our article in last month’s issue), AFNIC has not made this rule retroactive. The AFNIC publication in English can be accessed here.
This is most welcome news for UK-based registrants of existing .FR domain names (registered before 1 January 2021) as they do not need to do anything and can therefore keep using their domain names and renew them as normal. They can also perform all operations on their domain names and transfer them to another entity, if they wish, as long as the eligibility requirements are fulfilled.
It is to be noted that the above concerns not only domain names registered under .FR, but also under the other ccTLDs managed by AFNIC, which are: .RE (Reunion), .YT (Mayotte), .PM (Saint Pierre and Miquelon), .WF (Wallis and Futuna), and .TF (French Southern Territories).
AFNIC and EURid are not the only European Registries facing the issue of Brexit. Registro.it, the Italian Registry, is also affected since an EU presence is required for .IT domain names. For the moment, the Registry has not made a decision about how to handle this and is still allowing UK based entities to register .IT domain names. It will be interesting to see what position it takes in the near future.
Authored by the Anchovy News team
