Following the French government's announcement yesterday that AFNIC had been confirmed as the French registry for the next 7 years, new rules have been announced for .FR.

Currently, .FR is only open to individuals or companies that have a physical address in France.

In the next 2 weeks, AFNIC will open .FR to French nationals living abroad. The address-in-France requirement will therefore no longer be enforced for the domain owner, as long as he or she is a French national. The admin contact will still have to be located in France however.

After that, .FR will be opened up to any individual or business located in one of the European Union member states. This will go a long way towards bringing .FR in line with other major European domains like .DE or .UK, both of which are open to registrants outside of their respective countries.

Unfortunately, AFNIC says it will take it up to 2 years to open .FR to European registrants.