Enter Reunion Island market with a .RE Domain

Not in your own name. Article 5.1 of the Naming Policy opens registration only to natural persons residing, and legal persons established, in an EU member state or in Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland. Article 5.2 applies the same test to the administrative contact, so both roles must sit inside that area. If you have a European entity, you can apply directly. If you do not, the only route is for an eligible party to act as holder and administrative contact; the current price of that service appears during ordering.

Not at registration. Article 3.2 states the reason plainly: the French Post and Electronic Communications Code does not empower Afnic to check the supporting documents an applicant submits. That does not make the requirement soft. Afnic can open a verification on its own initiative, after a third-party report, or at a registrar's request; if it escalates to substantiation, your portfolio is suspended for up to 7 days, then blocked for up to 30, and deleted if no evidence arrives. No paperwork, but a real audit.

Three characters. Article 2.2 §21 names these five extensions explicitly and does not permit registrations of one- and two-character names (.pm, .re, .tf, .wf, .yt). Because one- and two-letter names are possible under mainland .fr, an applicant who does not know about this carve-out will simply have the order rejected. The upper limit is 63 characters, and a name may not begin or end with a hyphen. French accented characters such as é, è, ç and ô are listed one by one in the policy as permitted.

Between one and ten. Article 2.8 defines the validity period as one to ten years from registration and ties the length to the option the holder chooses with the registrar. Intermediate terms are not excluded, so two, three or five years are equally available. The third paragraph of the same article inverts the renewal logic used by most country extensions: renewal is implied, and the name lapses only when the registrar actively sends a deletion request.

There are two distinct operations. A change of registrar sits in Article 6.6: the holder freely picks a new registrar, which handles the formalities and must ensure the change does not affect ownership. A change of holder sits in Article 6.4 and is heavier: registrars must obtain the consent of both parties before the operation. The incoming holder must also satisfy the eligibility test. You can begin the move from the domain transfer page.

Not if you are a natural person. Article 8.4 says that, following a CNIL request and under the GDPR, a domain registered by a natural person is covered by default by the restricted publication option: no personal data appears in whois, only technical information, and you can still be reached by email without your details being disclosed. Company registrations are published, because the option is limited to natural persons as holders. You can run a lookup from the whois search page.