An article in The Register raised my eyebrows somewhat, regarding the blocking of all 11+ million .co.cc domain names from the Google search engine.

The .co.cc domain namespace is not a country-specific 'authorised' domain name suffix like .co.uk and .co.au but instead the domain name .co.cc is owned by a Korean company, who act as a 'freehost' - selling on domain names such as mydomain.co.cc to users via their website.  Some well known examples of 'freehost' websites are Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal and so forth.

Google have taken a step towards reducing the amount of spammy sites polluting their search engine, by 'bulk blocking' any sub-domains which are being abused by spammers.  In severe cases (no definition given of what is determined to be 'severe') this may result in the entire subdomain being blocked.  Given that the .co.cc site offers domains for free, it's little wonder it's exploited.

While I completely agree with the concept of blocking subdomains which are emitting large volumes of spammy websites (a Anti-Phishing Working Group report cited in the article on The Register states that  the .cc top-level domain hosted 4,963 phishing attacks in the second half of 2010, almost twice the number found under any other extension) it does raise some concern at the power of this measure.

Imagine for example that you had created a website with this .co.cc domain name for whatever reason, you wake up one morning and zap .. you've disappeared from Google.

It may be a great way to quickly cut down on the spammy sites appearing however it does seem to be something of a blunt force instrument that could potentially cause significant problems for innocent website owners in the future, when one would hope there was more sophisticated technology available to intelligently screen out sites without this action being required. 

Given the monopoly that Google has in web searches (how often do you hear people suggest you 'Bing' that or 'Yahoo Search' that?) how long is it before we see other freehosts being blocked?