The French Network Information Center (Afnic) that is a registry for the country’s ccTLD .FR, has published the 2014 report. The document states that as of the end of 2014 2,853,406 domain names were registered in .FR domain zone. The growth rate of the French domain last year was over 5%. This is twice as much compared to the European average – 2.2%. Moreover, .FR managed to surpass the growth rate of the global domain name market in general that was 4.3%.
Also, Afnic successfully launched four French new gTLDs - .OVH, .PARIS, .BZH and .FROGANS. Afnic is a technical registry operator of the new domain zones that by the end of last year had about 73 thousand registrations.
In addition, the report states that since July 1 last year the price of the registration operations with domain names in .FR was decreased by 5%. As a result considering current euro/dollar exchange rate domain .FR is 35% cheaper for registrants than .COM.
