AFNIC, the incumbent French registry, will continue to operate .FR. Minister for Industry Christian Estrosi today signed a 7 year contract with AFNIC to run the French top level domain.

In January 2009, the French authorities started a tender process to determine if AFNIC should be allowed to stay on as registry for .FR. As an AFNIC Board member, I've known for a while that AFNIC would most likely be awarded the contract, but I was sworn to secrecy.

Estrosi says that in order to get the registry contract, AFNIC has had to commit to spending at least 5% of its revenue on strengthening the .FR infrastructure to improve its load and request management capabilities.

During the first half of 2010, AFNIC will also open .FR to French nationals living abroad (right now an address in France is required to register a .FR domain name).