co.cc : Google De-Indexes All .Co.Cc Domain Extensions

Google has just blocked more than 11 millions of .co.cc websites from its search engine result pages due to the fact that majority of them leverage that avenue for spam activities.

The domain .co.cc is offered by a Korea company (http://co.cc) that actually owns the domain name .co.cc, so it is not yet officially autorized as a second-level domain like co.au or co.uk.

According to google they see the firm as a "freehost" and has the right to block the whole domain "if we see a very large faction of sites on a specific freehost are spammy or low-quality", according to Matt Cutt, head of Google's web spam team.

In a recent blog post, the company said "To help protect users we recently modified those [malware-scanning] systems to identify bulk subdomain services which are being abused. In some severe cases our systems may now flag the whole bulk domain.

Recently the Anti-Phishing Working Group released  a 29-page report stating that .cc top-level domain hosted 4,963 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010, thats almost double the number found under any other extension.

Reason was due to a large number of attacks originating from .co.cc addresses, the APWG said.

The registry offers single sub-domain for free and allows customers to bulk-register 15,000 addresses at a time for a mere $1000 or about seven cents a name.

The stats on their website claims to have 5,735,855 individual accounts and a total of 11,383,736 registered domains, making it one of the largest domain extensions in the world even bigger than both .org and .uk over two million domains.

ICANN Approves New Top-Level Domains

The Board of ICANN today gave final approval to the most dramatic change to the Internet in four decades — allowing the expansion of new Top-Level Domains (TLDs). This monumental decision will allow companies and organizations to turn their own brands into Internet domain extensions (that is .brand) or to create broad generic strings such as .CAR, .SPORTS or .BANK. ICANN's TLD expansion plan was first announced three years ago on June 26, 2008 at the 32nd ICANN Meeting in Paris. The ICANN board members voted 13 for, 1 against, 2 abstain during its 41st international meeting currently underway in Singapore.

"ICANN has opened the Internet's addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination. No one can predict where this historic decision will take us," said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN. "Today's decision will usher in a new Internet age," said Peter Dengate Thrush, Chairman of ICANN's Board of Directors. "We have provided a platform for creativity and inspiration, and for the next big dot-thing."

ICANN in it's official announcement said today that it will soon begin a global campaign to tell the world about this dramatic change in Internet names and to raise awareness of the opportunities afforded by new gTLDs. Applications for new gTLDs will be accepted from 12 January 2012 to 12 April 2012.

ICANN's Board approves the New gTLD Program during a special session held on Monday, 
20 June 2011 in Singapore. (Photo Source: ICANN)

ICANN has indicated that it anticipates between 300 and 1,000 new TLDs could be created under the new program, providing an alternative to existing TLDs such as .com or .net.

Steve Crocker, ICANN Board Member, in his remarks during the board session said: "Many people will write positive and negative things, I'm sure. I hope that this is studied in business schools going forward and analyzed in many ways. And we'll look back and try to understand what the results were compared to what we expected. And I think that's a very healthy process. But having been involved in a series of key decisions along way from the very beginning, I fully understand that trying to do it exactly right and particularly trying to hold things up to get things exactly right, is exactly the wrong thing to do."

According to Melbourne IT Digital Brand Services, ninety-two per cent of the 150 organizations which have expressed interest to the company about applying for a new Top Level Domain (TLD) indicated their preferred choice would be their core brand name, or a ‘.brand’.  (For example: Canon has publicly stated they will apply for ‘.canon’).  A further 11% indicated they were interested in applying for a generic term as a TLD (example generic names could be .bank, .hotel and so on).