AFNIC

AFNIC (Association Française pour le Nommage Internet en Coopération) is a non-profit organization that administers the TLD registry for France (.fr) and its overseas territories. It was established in 1997 jointly by the INRIA (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control of France) and the Government of France, represented by the Ministries of Telecommunications, Industries and Research.

History

1986-1997: NIC-France From 1986 to 1997, INRIA was responsible for the management of the French TLD .fr (ccTLD ISO code 3166) on behalf of the Standard Research Institute’s Network Information Centre (SRI-NIC) and the INTERNIC. Until 1992, INRIA also managed Fnet (also called the INRIA network), which, at the time, was the only internet service in France. As demand increased, INRIA opened up for everyone in France who wanted internet connectivity. With the appearance of new network service providers, a Consultative Committee (CC-NIC) was setup in 1994 comprising of representatives each from the INRIA and the service providers. Since then many service providers have joined the consultative committee and provides funds to NIC-France. Intellectual property issues were considered for the first time by setting rules for assigning names under the .fr domain. November 1995, NIC-France stopped the service of allocating IP addresses.

Post-1998: AFNIC On January 1, 1998 AFNIC was created and is governed by the French law of July 1, 1901. It took over from INRIA with an intention of providing flexible management structure and wide support to its members which was not possible to achieve by a research institute.

Tasks and services

AFNIC follows three main missions

Technical mission: AFNIC is responsible for managing some of the Top Level Domains (TLDs) and assigning responsibility of these to service providers of the French national territory.

Currently AFNIC handles the following ccTLDs:

• .fr- France
• .re - Reunion Island
• .tf - French Southern Territories
• .yt - Mayotte
• .pm - Saint-Pierre and Miquelon
• .wf - Wallis and Futuna Islands

It also ensures accessibility of these domains from any point on the internet and is responsible for maintaining databases for these domains. It serves with a mission of contributing to the digital economic development of France by developing and providing services to the Internet service providers.

General Interest mission: AFNIC ensures the presence of French national territory on the internet and provides resources to national public institutions for registry services and support services for French digital economic development.

Scientific mission: AFNIC has the responsibility of forecasting internet evolutions and extending cooperation with other countries on the matters of domain name industry and research.

Members

It consists of members from both public and private internet players responsible for the use and development of the Internet. Members including the founders INRIA and the French government are public authoritative representatives, legal entities (companies, organizations, plants) and individuals, the domain name registrars or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and international entities. In addition there are honorary members who are awarded membership by the board of directors for providing services to the association.

International Cooperation

AFNIC is majorly involved in international relations and works on three main guidelines:

1. Participate and contribute in the global internet management and governance in association with ICANN, CENTR, WSIS and so on.
2. Introduce new services and standards like IETF, RIPE.
3. Educate others with its knowledge and expertise of the field.

Some of the international organizations related to AFNIC

CENTR: AFNIC is one of the co-founders of CENTR. Through it, AFNIC tries to promote the importance of Internet-related intellectual property rights and actively participates in its proceedings to improve operational exchanges between ccTLDs, particularly with those based in Europe.

ICANN: AFNIC vows to participate actively to coordinate Internet related activities at a global level. In this effort, AFNIC provides support in creation of ccNSO (Country Code Names Supporting Organization), an organization which handles issues related to ccTLDs from a global perspective . This organization represents ccTLDs at ICANN. AFNIC provided technical support to DNSO, which is ICANN’s supporting organization, till July 2003. AFNIC also provides support to ICANN’s working groups, to improve naming quality, operational exchanges between ccTLD registries and internet stability.

Research and development

In accordance with the scientific mission, AFNIC tries to make improvements related to internet use and services. It conducts various experiments on its own or as requested by French authorities or international partners.

It has worked on various projects such as;

• DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) with a goal of increasing security of DNS.
• Internet of Things (IOT) where different objects communicate directly or indirectly with devices which connect to the internet and the Object Naming Service (ONS) which is a standard that enables EPCs (Electronic Product Codes) present in RFID tags to be linked to the internet.
• ENUM (tElephone NUmber Mapping) is a method of converting a telephone number into an internet domain name by querying a Domain Name Server (DNS).
• IPv6 the latest version of Internet Protocol.
• Generic NIC, a website with an objective of providing help with the formation or reorganization of bodies managing the internet Top Level Domain.

Top-Level Domain

Country Code Names Supporting Organization. Develops and recommends to the Board global policies relating to country-code top-level domains (ICANN Bylaws).

Deprecated. Domain Name Supporting Organization. Predecessor of the Generic Names Supporting Organization, which advised the Board with respect to policy issues relating to the Domain Name System (ICANN Bylaws).

Country code top-level domain