I am; I can't buy <firstname>.<anything> because it's a municipality or something in France and so I can't have the domain name for one of their overseas islands like Pierre et Miquelon (.pm). My registrar gave a refund for that one after the registration failed
But that's not the case for the domains AFNIC did grant. They registered successfully and I can still use them, also after this verification sham, AFNIC just insisted that I confirm immediately that I e.g. live where I said I live over ten years ago
I'm well aware that GDPR exists in France btw, but AFNIC is not — or at least has a different interpretation of what "not processing data unnecessarily" and "treating racial, biometric, and gender data as extra sensitive" means (they insisted I send all of these categories over plain email to a helpdesk system; I tried giving them an https link to a .jpg on the domain in question instead, but that was rejected with a "please attach to the email")
But that's not the case for the domains AFNIC did grant. They registered successfully and I can still use them, also after this verification sham, AFNIC just insisted that I confirm immediately that I e.g. live where I said I live over ten years ago
I'm well aware that GDPR exists in France btw, but AFNIC is not — or at least has a different interpretation of what "not processing data unnecessarily" and "treating racial, biometric, and gender data as extra sensitive" means (they insisted I send all of these categories over plain email to a helpdesk system; I tried giving them an https link to a .jpg on the domain in question instead, but that was rejected with a "please attach to the email")