• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Advertise
  • Awards
  • Privacy Policy
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • RSS
TheDomains.com

AFNIC Awarded New Contract To Run .FR Registry But Only After Open Bidding Results In Reduced Prices

August 7, 2012 by Michael Berkens

I know that a lot of American’s complain about the French, but in this case they got it right and we got it wrong.

Like Verisign which operates the .com/.net registry under contract, AFNIC is the company that run’s the .FR registry for France under contract from the government and has done so since 1998.

Due to complaints, France opened up bidding for the contract to run the registry.

There were over a dozen bidders for the contract including FRNIC which PCWorld.fr named “as favorite to take over“. FRNIC is an consisting  of a share registrar Starting Dot and the Free Enterprise Foundation, also Registration Office for Internet extensions applied to run .Fr, which French is a subsidiary of Open Registry.

However AFNIC was just awarded a five year renewal of the contract but unlike the Verisign contract to operate .com/.net, in which they are guaranteed a 7% rate increase in every 4 of 6 years, with a presumptive renewal, all AFNIC got was a five year contract.

Under the new contract AFNIC will actually have to LOWER the wholesale price of a .FR domain name, over the next two years, although the wholesale price for a .FR domain is already 20% lower than a .com (not counting the 7% price increases Verisign will be entitled to in the next 4 out of 6 years).

In addition, AFNIC under the new contract agreed to invest additional amounts in security and R&D for the .Fr registry and to promote the .fr TLD.

Additionally under the new agreement, AFNIC agreed to donate a portion of the profits from the .fr TLD to a Support fund for the development of the Internet, with independent governance, which will fund research initiatives for the development of the Internet.

Of course once this type of contract is opened to competitive bidding the consumer wins.

As you know, in the case of Verisign’s .com/.net contract there were no other bidders allowed and we wound up with a no bid, forever contract with a guaranteed rate increase although Verisign already operates at a 50% profit margin.

This should be an eye opener to someone in Congress that granting a monopoly with guaranteed rate increase was a huge oversight and follow the lead of France and re-open the contract with competitive bidding which will no doubt result in a lower cost to the consumer, just like France did.

 

Filed Under: ccTLD's

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

« Ukrainian Registrar Ukrnames Has Joined the SedoMLS Premium Network
Ari Goldberger Beats Back UDRP on Costa.com »

Comments

  1. George Kirikos says

    August 7, 2012 at 12:36 pm

    Indeed, the Department of Commerce and US Department of Justice need to step in and break up the anti-competitive contracts that ICANN is signing with VeriSign, Afilias, Neustar, etc.

    Presumptive renewal for registry operators is by its very nature anti-competitive. Even senators run for office every six years. If we had “presumptive renewal” for politicians, we’d be living in a dictatorship.


Recent Articles

  • Will $15M seem like a steal or a huge overpay 5 years from now for NFTs.com?
  • Sedo weekly domain name sales led by Afloat.com
  • Galileo.net from $4,050 to $50K in a little over a month

Recent Comments

  • Rex on Will $15M seem like a steal or a huge overpay 5 years from now for NFTs.com?
  • Joe on Will $15M seem like a steal or a huge overpay 5 years from now for NFTs.com?
  • steve on Will $15M seem like a steal or a huge overpay 5 years from now for NFTs.com?
  • MarkMajor on Will $15M seem like a steal or a huge overpay 5 years from now for NFTs.com?
  • Jon on Will $15M seem like a steal or a huge overpay 5 years from now for NFTs.com?

Polls

How Many .Web Domains Will Be Registered 1 Year After Launch

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...
  • Polls Archive

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Categories

Archives

domain name news

Copyright ©2019 TheDomains.com — Published by Worldwide Media, Inc. — Site by Nuts and Bolts Media