AFNIC,the company behind .fr,has revealed the inital results after opening the registration of IDNs on May 3,2012.

Here are the results :

• In the first 3 hours after opening the registration of IDNs, 32 registrars submitted creation operations for 1009 domain names with diacritical marks.

• “néria.fr” was the first IDN to be registered under the .fr TLD by the registrar ASTURIA.

• The 5 most popular new characters are as follows:

“é”, used 926 times,

“è”, used 118 times,

“à” and “ô”, each of which was used 25 times

“ç”, used 19 times.

• “gites-bretagne-côté-mer.fr”, “vannière.fr”, “kiosqueàdomicile.fr” and “bpifaçades.fr” are examples of the new domain names registered.

The Sunrise period for the new IDNs runs from May 3 to July 3,2012.After July 3,2012 registration will be open to all,according to the first come,first served rule.

For more information check out Afnic.fr