co.cc

» see co.cc as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A .com cost about ten dollars a year in 2009 and the registrar wanted a credit card. co.cc asked for neither. You picked a name and got yourname.co.cc for free. Then you pointed it at a Blogspot blog or a free host, through a DNS panel with the same record types a paid registrar gave you. I remember co.cc from the 2008 to 2011 window as the address a Blogspot blog graduated to when its owner wanted to look like a real site and did not want to pay for it. The language picker had 38 entries by 2012, Türkçe among them.

The company behind it sat in Goyang, a satellite city of Seoul, and printed its street address in the footer beside a Korean phone number. co.cc was never an official part of the .cc registry, which belongs to the Cocos Islands and is operated by VeriSign. It was one ordinary second-level domain whose owner handed out third-level names under it. The first capture of the service is from 3 October 2007, already promising free search engine submission and real-time visitor statistics.

Nobody announced the end. The last capture of the working homepage is dated 15 October 2012 and shows a counter reading 7,088,075 accounts and 13,551,191 domains. In the week of 15 November 2012 the name servers stopped answering, which took down the company's own site and every name under it in the same moment. Slashdot ran the story as "Free Registrar co.cc Goes the Way of the Dodo" and noted that signups had already been closed for some time.

~ the case file ~

~ seven cents a name ~

Two names per person were free. Past that there was a bulk price list, and it ran a long way up: 100 domains for 10 dollars at the bottom, 15,000 domains for 1,000 dollars at the top. At that tier a name cost about seven cents. No blogger needs fifteen thousand domains. The customers for that tier were people who burn through addresses, because each one lands on a blacklist within days.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group counted 4,963 phishing attacks on .cc addresses in the second half of 2010, nearly double any other extension, and most of them sat under co.cc. Sellers of fake antivirus used the service the same way. The site kept a "Spam or abuse" link in its header and a content policy in its footer.

~ the freehost rule ~

At the start of July 2011 every co.cc site disappeared from Google's results at once. The registry's own counter claimed 11,383,736 domains at the time, so the press rounded it to 11 million sites removed. Matt Cutts, who ran Google's webspam team, gave the reasoning: "if we see a very large fraction of sites on a specific freehost be spammy or low-quality, we do reserve the right to take action on the freehost as a whole."

The structure of the service is what made that possible. To a search engine, eleven million co.cc names were subdomains of one site, and that site carried the reputation of its worst tenants. A legitimate blog could file a reconsideration request for itself and wait. The advice on the Blogger help blogs was shorter: republish to your blogspot.com address, or buy a real domain.

~ what is there now ~

The domain went back into circulation once the company let go of it. In 2018 co.cc was listed for sale at 500,000 dollars, and Wikipedia records it as registered to a different owner from 2019. It answers on neither http nor https today. The free-name trade moved to Freenom's .tk and its sister extensions, which ran into the same abuse numbers and stopped registering new names in 2023.

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