Afnic,the company behind .FR domains,announced a week ago that as of today, .FR domain names will be available to all Europeans.The extensions .wf , .tf , .re , .pm and .yt will be open for Europeans too and will be subject to the same registration rules as the .fr TLD from 6 December ,2011 .

Afnic has also released its new naming policy for French TLDs .

Here are some of the rules published by Afnic :

• Any decisions to create or delete domain categories are taken by AFNIC’s governing bodies in coordination with the consultative Committees.
• If domain names are still active within a given domain category, that category may only be deleted after giving the affected domain name holders six (6) months’ notice to change their domain names.

Domain names cannot be registered which:

• consist of a single character;

• consist of only two letters;

• consist of precomposed characters;

• begin or end with a hyphen “-“;

• are longer than 255 characters (63 between each “.”); ») ;

• and whose 3rd and 4th characters are hyphens “xx–“.

Except where provisions to the contrary are made for certain domain names, and subject to the provisions of Article L45-2 of the French Electronic Communications and Telecommunications Act, transaction requests sent to AFNIC by Registrars are handled on a
“first come, first served” basis, meaning that they are processed by chronological order of receipt.

In order to register a term subject to prior review, the applicant must ensure that the domain name:

• is not liable to disrupt public order or morality, or the rights guaranteed by the French Constitution or French law;

• is not liable to infringe intellectual property rights or personal rights or is not identical or related to that of the French Republic, of a local authority or group of local authorities, of an institution or a local or national public service, unless the applicant provides proof of a legitimate interest and is acting in good faith.