question Domain name confusion

[LosAtmos]

I’ve been watching an expired domain name for some time now, and had placed a bid on it through Sedo. The domain in question is “fr.fr”. Yesterday I got an email from Sedo stating that the seller is no longer the registered owner and my bid was canceled. I then looked the domain up on whois.com and it returned an error that the domain was invalid. I checked namecheap and it said the domain is unavailable. I’m so confused now, if nobody owns the domain why can’t it be registered? I did a web search and I saw on the google domains page that .fr names (extension for France) are between 3 and 60-something characters long, but I’m not sure if that’s on the protocol level or just google. If it is on the protocol level, why was that change made? Seems like a good way to piss off a lot of 1 and 2 character domain holders.

 

[twiki]

It's likely reserved by the registry and won't be placed for sale.

Not sure how Sedo listed it...