.CC

.cc is technically the country code for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, a speck of Australian territory in the Indian Ocean with a few hundred residents. Verisign has operated it as a global extension for decades and sold it as the next best thing to .com, with the obvious "cc" abbreviation helping the story.

It had a genuine boom in China in the mid-2010s, where short numeric and letter .cc names traded at real money, and it still has a presence there. In the West it never got past "alternative," and most end users don't recognize it.

The aftermarket is real but narrow. Short numerics and LLL.cc names have investor demand, mostly Chinese. Keyword .cc names for Western buyers are a hard sell.