Buy .fr Domain Name

Not in France, but you do need one in Europe. Article 5.1 of the Naming Policy opens registration only to natural persons residing, and legal persons whose registered office or main establishment sits, in an EU member state or in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland. No French address is asked for: a company in Berlin and a private individual in Lisbon qualify on the same terms. Türkiye is not on that list, so a Turkish resident or company cannot be the registrant in its own name. Article 5.2 applies the same test to the administrative contact, which means an eligible party has to appear as both holder and administrative contact.

For an ordinary .fr registration, none at all. That is not flexibility but a limit on the registry's powers: the rules state that French law gives Afnic no authority to vet the supporting documents applicants produce, such as a company registration extract, a trademark receipt or a prefecture certificate. The check is deferred instead. Afnic can open a substantiation process on its own initiative, on a third-party report or at a registrar's request; your portfolio is then suspended for up to seven days, blocked for up to thirty if no evidence follows, and deleted if evidence is still missing. Two exceptions are documented: names subject to prior review, and gouv.fr names reserved for the State.

Start with the mechanism: renewal under .fr is implied. The rules state that a domain name is renewed unless the registrar sends a deletion request, so the name does not simply drop on the expiry date. It is deleted only if your registrar asks for deletion, and that is the single case in which a redemption period runs; during it the name can be reactivated with the same configuration. For every other ground of deletion — a court decision, a transfer ordered in a dispute procedure, an administrative order, a failed verification, the orphan-domain procedure — no redemption delay exists and the name returns straight to the public domain.

Two separate operations get confused here. In a change of registrar the holder is free to choose the new provider, and the rules oblige that provider to ensure the change does not affect ownership of the name in any way. A change of holder is a different procedure: the registrar must obtain the consent of both parties before acting, in bankruptcy or liquidation only the appointed administrator can give that consent, and the new holder goes through identity and eligibility checks. Names subject to prior review carry an extra lock: the transfer happens only after the new holder obtains Afnic's authorisation on the same terms. Start on the domain transfer page.

No. The rules settle it in one sentence: the .tm.fr, .asso.fr and .com.fr naming zones were closed to registration on 15 March 2013, and names taken before that date are maintained. For those names only operations compliant with the Policy are accepted, and only qualification operations concerning the existence and reachability of the holder are carried out — existing holders keep using and renewing their names, but no new name opens in these zones. The practical consequence is simple: to secure a name in the French market the only route is the second level, directly under .fr. Measurement agrees, since these prefixes are served from inside the .fr zone rather than as separate zones.

For individuals, no. The stated principle is that all holder, administrative and technical contact information should be published; but at the request of the French data protection authority and in application of the GDPR, a name registered by a natural person is covered by the “restricted publication” option by default. When it applies, no personal data appears in whois and only technical information remains: the registrar's details and the DNS servers. The mask is lifted only by a court order, by the request of an authority holding a right of communication, or through a form on Afnic's website — and that form is not automatic, as Afnic may refuse given the applicant's status or purpose. Check yours on the whois search page.

Two procedures run by Afnic itself. The rules bind the holder unreservedly to the SYRELI and PARL EXPERT procedures, then set the boundary in the next line: Afnic is bound by no other alternative dispute resolution procedure. The UDRP you know from generic extensions does not operate in this zone, so a challenge to a .fr name, or against yours, goes to one of those two. Court proceedings remain available, but Afnic is never a party to them and has no power to take precautionary measures; those are implemented only on a court order meeting the stated requirements. Afnic also runs a separate mediation service.

Afnic maintains a list of terms subject to prior review and publishes it on its website, though the rules say plainly that the published list is not exhaustive, since publishing some of those terms could offend members of the public. For such a name the registrar sends the supporting documents to Afnic beforehand; if the review succeeds Afnic issues an authorisation code, and without that code the name cannot be registered. The test has two limbs: the name must not be liable to disrupt public order or morality or constitutional rights, and must not infringe intellectual property or personal rights or be identical or similar to the name of the French Republic, a local authority or a public service, unless legitimate interest and good faith are proven.