.cc

Management

It is administered by an American company, VeriSign, through a subsidiary company, eNIC, which promotes it for international registration as "the next .com".

The .cc domain was originally assigned to eNIC in October 1997 by the IANA; eNIC manages the TLD alongside SamsDirect Internet.

Registration

Registration is made directly at second-level.

Second level domains

gov.cu.cc, com.cc, net.cc, edu.cc, org.cc

A number of second-level domain names are also maintained by CoCCA, including "com.cc", "net.cc", "edu.cc", and "org.cc".

cc.cc, co.cc, cu.cc, cz.cc

These are not official hierarchies of .cc, but domains held by companies who offer no charge subdomain registration.

co.cc

The co.cc URL has been known to host spammers, who create spam blogs, or "splogs", often with nonsense names.

Due to such spamming, in July 2011 Google removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search results.

Legitimate sites (per Google's Webmaster Guidelines) on the .co.cc subdomain could send a reconsideration request to Google to have their specific site excluded from the ban.

The abundance of cheap .co.cc domains had also been used by those who sold fake "anti-virus" programs.

From 2012 to 2014, the co.cc website and name servers were not online. There was no formal statement by the company, but they did stop accepting new registrations some time before they closed.

In 2018, co.cc was listed for sale for US$500,000. As of 2019, co.cc is registered to and in use by another entity.

Usage

The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus also uses the .cc domain, along with .nc.tr.

Google treats .cc as a generic top-level domain (gTLD) because "users and website owners frequently see [the domain] as being more generic than country-targeted."

The TLD is preferred by many cricket and cycling clubs, as well as churches and Christian organizations, since "CC" can be an abbreviation for "Christian Church" or "Catholic Church".

Some open-source/open-hardware projects, such as the Arduino project, use a .cc for their home pages, since "CC" is also the abbreviation for "Creative Commons", whose licenses are used in the projects.

Business owners in Southern Massachusetts are rapidly adopting Cape Cod CC domains for local identity. Canadian Club whiskey has also used .cc domains for marketing purposes.

It is also used for some community colleges, though other domains, such as .edu, are more popular.

Issues

In 2016, the Anti-Phishing Working Group stated that the .cc, .com, .pw, and .tk domain names account for 75% of all malicious domain registrations.

References

References

1. (14 February 2001). "S. Hrg. 107-1100 - Icann Governance". U.S. Government Printing Office.
2. (2011-07-06). "Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its results". The Register.
3. (2011-07-01). "Google Delists All CO.CC Domains From Index". Searchengineland.com.
4. (July 2011). "Google Bans A Complete Subdomain From Index: co.cc". Seroundtable.com.
5. "Google Discussiegroepen".
6. David Talbot. "The Perfect Scam". [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]].
7. (2012-11-15). "Free Registrar co.cc Goes the Way of the Dodo".
8. "This domain name CO.CC is for sale".
9. "Cobra Browser".
10. "Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites". Google Support.
11. Judah, Jacob. (2023-11-02). "How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrime". [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]].