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.cc

Introduced	1997
TLD type	Country code top-level domain
Status	Inactive
Registry	eNIC (a VeriSign company)
Sponsor	Island Internet Services
Intended use	Entities connected with  Cocos Islands
Actual use	A varied assortment of sites, few of them relating to those islands
Registration restrictions	None
Structure	Registrations permitted at second level
Documents	Registration agreement
Dispute policies	UDRP
Website	eNIC

.cc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory. It is administered by VeriSign through a subsidiary company eNIC, which promotes it for international registration as "the next .com"; .cc was originally assigned in October 1997 to eNIC Corporation of Seattle WA by the IANA. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, an unrecognised country by the UN, that officially belongs to the republic of Cyprus, also uses the .cc domain, along with .nc.tr.

With the help of SamsDirect Internet, eNIC managed and marketed the top level domain with great success to become the "second largest TLD registry in the United States second only to Verisign" according to Brian Cartmell, founder and CEO of eNIC^[1] who testified before the United States Senate in regard to The Governance of the Domain Name System by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers on February 4, 2001. Much of the success of the domain sales came as a direct result of Sams entering into a deal with the largest radio broadcaster in the United States, Clear Channel (CC) Communications, to advertise and promote the domain on several hundred radio stations over a three month period.

Registration is made directly at second-level.

The .cc domain is preferred by many cycling clubs as well as churches and Christian organizations as "CC" also happens to be an abbreviation for "Christian Church" or "Catholic Church." Some open-source/open-hardware projects, e.g. the Arduino project, use a .cc for their home pages, as "CC" is the abbreviation for "Creative Commons", whose licenses are used in the projects. Canadian Club whiskey have also used .cc domains for marketing purposes.

Second level domains [edit]

com.cc, net.cc, edu.cc, org.cc [edit]

There are also these second-level domain names maintained by CoCCA. They removed it from their website, but it is still possible to register third-level domain names.

cc.cc, co.cc, cu.cc [edit]

They are not official hierarchies; they are domains owned by companies who offer free subdomain registration.

co.cc [edit]

The CO.CC company offered two free co.cc subdomains, as well as bulk discounts for ordering as many as 15,000 domain names at a time. These domains have been used by spammers to create spam blogs, or "splogs," often with nonsense names like "extensitiesdiminutal.co.cc" and the like but all registrants were in fact subject to a terms of service prohibiting standard illegalities.

Step-by-step instructions for registrants on how to use well known hosting services like Blogger, Windows Live, and Google Apps were included on its homepage.

Due to previously large use by website spammers of sub-domains from co.cc, in July 2011 Google removed over 11 million .co.cc websites from its search results. Google's JohnMu recommended that individuals who have legitimate sites (in line with Google's Webmaster Guidelines) on the .co.cc subdomain send a reconsideration request to Google to have their specific site excluded from the ban.^[2][3][4][5]

The abundance of cheap .co.cc domains has also been used by those who sell fake "anti-virus" programs.^[6]

As of November 2012, the co.cc website and name servers are no longer online. There was no formal statement by the company, but they did stop accepting new registrations some time before they closed.^[7]

See also [edit]

• .au

References [edit]

1. ^ Brian Cartmell CEO of eNIC testimony before the United States Senate Electronic Frontier Foundation
2. ^ "Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its results". July 6, 2011. 
3. ^ "Google Delists All CO.CC Domains From Index". Searchengineland.com. 2011-07-01. Retrieved 2012-06-17. 
4. ^ 06/08/2012 11:07 am. "Google Bans A Complete Subdomain From Index: co.cc". Seroundtable.com. Retrieved 2012-06-17. 
5. ^ "Google Discussiegroepen". Google.com. Retrieved 2012-06-17. 
6. ^ David Talbot. "The Perfect Scam". Technology Review. Retrieved 2012-06-17. 
7. ^ "Free Registrar co.cc Goes the Way of the Dodo". 2012-11-15. Retrieved 2012-11-15. 

External links [edit]

• VeriSign .cc whois database lookup