Introduced 1997 | Status Active | |
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Registry eNIC (a VeriSign company) Intended use Entities connected with Cocos Islands | ||
.cc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory of 5.4 square miles (14 km2; 1,400 ha) and about 600 inhabitants. It is administered by a US company, 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, Washington, by the IANA.
Contents
The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus — a country the UN does not recognise (they consider it to belong 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, 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.
Usage
The .cc domain is preferred by many cycling clubs, as well as churches and Christian organizations, since "CC" could 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 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.
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". Although no longer actively promoted on the CoCCA web site, they will still register third-level domain names on request.
cc.cc, co.cc, cu.cc, cz.cc
They are not official hierarchies; they are domains owned by companies who offer free subdomain registration.
co.cc
The CO.CC company offered two free .cc subdomains, as well as bulk discounts for ordering as many as 15,000 domain names at a time. These domains were used by spammers to create spam blogs, or "splogs", often with nonsense names such as "extensitiesdiminutal.co.cc", 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.
The abundance of cheap .co.cc domains had also been used by those who sold fake "anti-virus" programs.
During 2012-2014, 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.
As of 2015, the co.cc address and any associated domains all redirect to cc.cc, which is a website that facilitates screen capturing and earning commission through links, similar to services such as adf.ly.