.cc

On the Internet, .cc is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory. It is administered by a United 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 the IANA; eNIC manages the TLD alongside SamsDirect Internet. The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus also uses the .cc domain, along with .nc.tr. Registration is made directly at second-level. The .cc domain 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. A number of second-level domain names are also maintained by CoCCA, including "com.cc", "net.cc", "edu.cc", and "org.cc". These are not official hierarchies of .cc, but domains owned by companies who offer free subdomain registration. 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.