Summary

  • The .fr recording office is a ministerial designation under article L45 of the Code des postes et des communications électroniques, and the arrêté of 20 September 2021 gave Afnic five years without stating the date they run from.
  • The signed cahier des charges fills that gap with five years from 1 July 2022, prorogable once, and adds numeric commitments, a public dashboard, a third-party registrar survey and an annual return to the minister before 30 June.
  • The 2026 prorogation the state is consulting on has no published arrêté in the documents reviewed, and the consultation page itself displays two different closing dates.

Three instruments, three different jobs

The legal hook is short. Article L45 provides that the minister responsible for electronic communications designates, by arrêté and after a public consultation, the recording office of each national domain concerned, for a duration fixed by regulation; that the office reports annually to the minister; and it frames the possibility of withdrawing the designation. The version displayed entered into force on 15 March 2014. That is a power, not a contract.

The contract came separately. The arrêté of 20 September 2021, published in the Journal officiel no. 0228 of 30 September 2021 as text no. 11 under NOR ECOI2123706A, designates Afnic in its article 1 as the office charged with allocating and managing names within .fr for five years. It is signed for the minister and by delegation by T. Courbe, directeur général des entreprises, and the issuing authority named on the page is the Minister of the Economy, Finance and Recovery. The page states the five-year duration. It does not state the date the five years run from, and that silence is the reason the rest of the file matters.

Article 2 sends the prescriptions binding the office to an annex. The annex's operative text was not obtained: the JORFTEXT landing page and the authenticated PDF both returned HTTP 403 on 2026-11-13. Everything that follows therefore rests on the signed contractual instruments rather than on that annex, and no inference is drawn about what the annex says.

The cahier des charges signed on 30 July 2021 supplies the missing date. Section 2 c), page 3, fixes the concession at five years from 1 July 2022, prorogable once. Five years from 1 July 2022 puts the initial contractual end at 30 June 2027 — arithmetic from two printed elements, not a printed date.

Then there is the convention itself, held in two copies: the Afnic copy and the ministry's copy. The Direction générale des Entreprises references it as signed on 18 March 2022. Article 3 sets its entry into force at 1 July 2022 and ties its duration to that of the designation; article 2 defines the parties' responsibilities within the concession de service public for the management and development of .fr. The State's signature is clearly legible as 18 March 2022. The Afnic signature on the facsimile reads as the handwritten date "14 III 2022", while the automated extraction of the Afnic copy returns 14/11/2022. That divergence is a fact about two copies of one instrument and is reported as it stands; no single signing date is derived from it.

The numbers the state actually wrote down

This is where the French arrangement stops resembling a designation and starts resembling procurement. Annex 1 of the convention, page 17, sets a global availability target of 100% and a target of 99.40% for creation, WHOIS and RDAP. Scheduled maintenance is excluded, except where DNS resolution is affected, and information must go out within one hour of incidents that disrupt services.

Article 4, page 5, requires a monthly public dashboard and an annual survey of registrars carried out by a third party, with conclusions that are public and also transmitted to the minister. That is a rare combination: a metric a customer can watch month by month, and a structured channel by which the accredited intermediaries can say what they think of the registry to the ministry that designated it.

Article 17, page 13, requires separate analytical accounting and a report for the previous year sent to the minister before 30 June, covering activity, .fr statistics, disputes, research and development, training, satisfaction — and the allocation of 11% of revenue. That clause does not name the recipient of the 11%, its purpose or its period, and nothing here fills the gap. It is one of the more striking numbers in the file precisely because the instrument carries it without disposing of it.

The same article 17 allows audits at the State's expense announced fifteen days in advance. It does not explicitly require the report to be published in full, and no reviewed document establishes whether it is published or what it contains for any year. The report goes to the minister before 30 June; the public record as reviewed does not show it arriving anywhere else.

One internal mismatch is worth holding rather than resolving: article 4 refers to a report under article 15, while the report clause inspected sits at article 17. Both are visible in the same instrument. It is reported as displayed, with no inference about which number was intended.

The ladder has rungs, and it has gaps

The cahier des charges builds a graduated response. Section 6 b), pages 8–9, provides for permanent control of the concessionaire on documents or on site, with documents supplied on request, and states that no notice period above 48 hours may be imposed. Section 6 c) requires a formal notice by registered letter and a minimum of eight weeks from its receipt before further steps. Section 6 d) then allows, after an unsuccessful formal notice for failure of essential obligations, a provisional régie at the concessionaire's cost and risk, limited to six months. Section 7 b), page 11, addresses serious and repeated failure through a prior meeting and a formal notice of at least eight weeks, permits termination if the failure is not remedied, and places the resulting direct costs on the concessionaire.

What is not there matters as much. No automatic fine scale was identified in the sections inspected. And the two instruments set different notice periods for state scrutiny — 48 hours at most under section 6 b) of the cahier des charges, fifteen days under article 17 of the convention. Both are displayed; the articulation between them is not explained in either text, and this briefing does not invent one.

Withdrawal has its own route. Articles 19 and 20 of the convention link a withdrawal under article R.20-44-42 of the CPCE to termination and place transfer costs on Afnic where an early termination results from its fault. R.20-44-42 as consulted in its 16 October 2021 historical view provides for notification of the draft withdrawal and its reasons, then two months for the office's observations. That two-month window is a different clock from the eight-week cure period, and the two must not be conflated.

The renewal is, so far, a page arguing with itself

The Direction générale des Entreprises publishes a consultation on the prorogation of the .fr designation for a further five years, referring back to the arrêté of 20 September 2021, the cahier des charges signed on 30 July 2021 and the convention signed on 18 March 2022. It is a consultation notice. It is not an arrêté granting anything, and reading it as the extension would be the single easiest error in this file.

The page also contradicts itself on time. Its header displays a period running from 28 July to 15 August 2026; the body sets the deadline for comments at 15 October 2026. Both are reported as displayed. No deadline is derived from the page, because the page does not support one.

Behind it sits an indexed notice. The Journal officiel reference is described in indexed search results as a prior consultation on renewal, appearing in JORF no. 0176 of 30 July 2026 as text no. 16 under NOR ECOI2620730X. Direct attempts to open the original returned HTTP 403, so its title, date and NOR were not confirmed on the document and no passage of it is quoted. That is a limit of this review, not a finding about the notice.

The scope discipline matters here, because 2026 arrêtés do exist for this operator. One arrêté of 22 June 2026, published on 26 June 2026, designates Afnic for .mq, .gp, .gf, .re and .tf for five years from 4 May 2026, prorogable once. A second, published the same day, covers .yt, .pm and .wf for five years from 2 June 2026, prorogable once. Both are real, both concern Afnic, and neither concerns .fr. A reader who finds them and stops there will conclude the renewal happened. It did not, in these documents.

As of 2026-11-13, no arrêté pronouncing the prorogation or renewal of the .fr designation was identified in the documents reviewed. That is an absence of result in this review. It is not proof that no such instrument exists, and anyone who needs certainty should look for the arrêté rather than for reassurance in this page.

What a .fr holder can check tonight

The association behind the registry is documented separately from the concession. The statutes were voted at and entered into force on the general assembly of 15 October 2024; article 1 places Afnic under the law of 1 July 1901 and the decree of 16 August 1901, article 2 includes in its object the allocation and management of the domain names referred to in article L45 of the CPCE, and article 5 names Inria and the State, represented by three ministries, among the founding members. The registry is a 1901 association whose founding members include the ministry that designates it. That is a governance fact, not a service guarantee.

The registration rules sit in a third document again. The naming charter, presented by Afnic's own document page as the version in force from 6 July 2026, lists .fr, .re, .yt, .pm, .wf and .tf in its scope at article 1.1, and at article 1.3 ties the opposable version to the one the site indicates as in force when a registration request is received, distinguishing new domains from existing domains on an act request or a renewal.

So the practical answer to "which document governs my domain" is unusually clean: the charter version displayed at the moment of the request. The practical answer to "did the registry meet what it promised" is much less clean. A registrant can read the availability target. A registrar can answer the third-party survey if it is asked. Neither can, from the reviewed record, read the report that goes to the minister before 30 June — and no reviewed document says whether that report is ever published.

That is the shape of the French arrangement. The obligation is specific, quantified and written down; the verification stops at a desk in the ministry; and the one live procedural step that would extend the whole structure for another five years currently exists in public as a consultation page that cannot agree with itself about when it closed. For an operator, a registrar or a competitor planning past June 2027, the arrêté — not the consultation — is the document to wait for.

See the BTW directory entry for Afnic for the entity record behind this briefing.