Afnic 2014 Report: .FR Grows 5%, Opens 1 & 2 Character Registrations

afnic Afnic’s annual general meeting was held on June 12, 2015. On the same occasion, the association published its 2014 Activity report.

For Afnic, 2014 in many ways was a year of opening, in every sense of the term:

opening of the Internet top-level domains .frogans, .ovh, .paris and .bzh, underlining Afnic’s position as the leading technical registry operator in France;
opening of the registration of domain names consisting of one or two characters under the .fr TLD;
opening of discussions to transition the oversight of the domain name root system, and organization at the national level of discussions on Internet Governance;
opening of new services, such as the launch of Afnic Consulting, which presents a range of analytical services and technical and marketing expertise on domain names.

The .fr TLD continued to grow in 2014, with an increase of 5% over the year. That performance is higher than the average for European gTLDs (2.2%) and global growth in the domain name market (4.3%). At year-end 2014, there were 2,853,406 domain names registered under the .fr TLD.

The fees for operations for .fr decreased by 5% on 1 July 2014. Applying the current dollar / euro exchange rate, the .fr is now 35% cheaper than the .com.

A total of four new TLDs (.ovh, .paris, .bzh, and .frogans) for which Afnic is the technical registry operator were made fully operational in 2014, meaning that in all, six nTLDs went live (.aquarelle and .alsace were not open to the public at year-end 2014, but were technically operational). The successful launches of top level domains for the City of Paris, OVH and the www.bzh association resulted in an installed base of 72,912 domain names at year-end 2014.

Afnic continued to be involved in the governance of the Internet in 2014. Afnic staff went to 56 meetings in France and abroad to share their expertise.

In December 2014, Afnic obtained “Recognized for Excellence” certification at 4 star-level for its quality approach from the European Foundation for Quality Management.

Also in December 2014, The Board of Directors of the Fondation de France accepted the principle of the creation of a Foundation under its aegis, entitled the Afnic Foundation for Digital Solidarity, 90% of whose resources are funded by profits from the management of the .fr TLD by Afnic.