It is administered by aUnited States 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 theIANA; eNIC manages the TLD alongside SamsDirect Internet.[1]
The co.cc URL has been known to hostspammers, who createspam blogs, or "splogs", often with nonsense names.
Due to such spamming, in July 2011Google 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.[2][3][4][5]
From 2012 to 2014, the co.cc website andname servers were not online. There was no formal statement by the company, but they did stop accepting new registrations some time before they closed.[7]
In 2018, co.cc was listed for sale for US$500,000.00.[8] As of 2019, co.cc is registered to and in use by another entity.[9]
Google treats .cc as ageneric top-level domain (gTLD) because "users and website owners frequently see [the domain] as being more generic than country-targeted."[10]
The TLD is preferred by many cricket and cycling clubs, as well as churches andChristian organizations, since "CC" can be an abbreviation for "Christian Church" or "Catholic Church".
Some open-source/open-hardware projects, such as theArduino project, use a .cc for their home pages, since "CC" is also the abbreviation for "Creative Commons", whoselicenses are used in the projects.
Business owners in Southern Massachusetts are rapidly adoptingCape Cod CC domains for local identity.Canadian Club whiskey has also used .cc domains for marketing purposes.[citation needed]
It is also used for somecommunity colleges, though other domains, such as.edu, are more popular.
