cc : Ask Biography

Home | Top level domain | cc

.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 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.

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.