Afnic Approved as ICANN Registry Service Provider for New gTLDs

Event date: 2026-02-18 · Source: Afnic named 'Registry Service Provider' by ICANN, published 2026-02-18.

What happened

On 18 February 2026 Afnic, the association that runs France's .fr and eight French overseas TLDs, announced that ICANN had designated it a Registry Service Provider (RSP). In ICANN's 2026 round of new generic top-level domains, an applicant's technical back end must be operated by a provider that passed this pre-evaluation, so the designation is a requirement, not a label. Afnic states that it is the only French operator to have obtained it, and that the application window for new TLDs would run from 30 April to 12 August 2026, the first round since 2012. The announcement also gives some background on the organisation: founded in 1997, based in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, with close to 100 staff and more than 25 years of registry operation.

Who is affected

• Owners of .fr domains: nothing changes. The designation concerns Afnic's services for other TLDs, not the rules or prices of .fr.
• Applicants in the 2026 round: a brand, city or organisation applying for its own TLD chooses a back-end operator; RSP status is what makes a provider eligible. Which providers ICANN has approved is public information on ICANN's New gTLD Program site.
• Everyone else: an item to know about, not to act on. The application window mentioned in the announcement has since closed.

What to do

Nothing. If you are among the applicants, the evaluation of your application includes the RSP you named; the announcement itself asks nothing of registrants.

Background

The .fr TLD page has the registry facts for France's country-code domain, and our post on the close of the 2026 round explains what happens to the applications next.

Sources

• Afnic, "Afnic named 'Registry Service Provider' by ICANN", 18 February 2026: https://www.afnic.fr/en/observatory-and-resources/news/afnic-named-registry-service-provider-by-icann/