This is something I’ve thought would make an interesting article for a long time, but it doesn’t really have a huge amount of substance to it. So I figured it would be easy enough to bash out here for anyone interested.
I’m sure everyone has noticed that a huge number of cycling brands use a .cc domain name. But where did that come from?
The origins date back to Simon Mottram and Rapha. One of Mottram’s original business ideas, before creating Rapha, was to open a series of cycling cafés. But as Rapha took hold of his imagination, he figured he could eventually open these cycling cafés as part of Rapha.
The rapha.com domain was taken at the time, so rapha.cc was registered instead, with the .cc intended to stand for “cycling club”. The brand only acquired the .com domain later.
Rapha eventually launched its cycling clubs, and its retail outlets became known as “clubhouses”.
The rest, as they say, is history. A bunch of cycling brands followed Rapha’s lead and adopted .cc domains (and I doubt that most even know why - it’s just become the de facto domain name for cycling brands).
And for those wondering which country gets the .cc country-code top-level domain, it’s the Cocos Islands, an Australian territory consisting of 27 coral islands in the Indian Ocean, about 2,750km northwest of Perth.
Spare a thought for the poor people of Cocos trying to launch a website since 2004…
Always thought it was a bit strange that there was a top level domain that seemed perfect for cycling related sites, and thought surely we can’t be big enough that ICANN would create a TLD for us, but never actualy bothered to google it. Never occured to me that it was a country code.
So like them or not, Rapha had a fair bit of influence on our sport, in more ways than many people realise.
There are a few other “country” TLDs that have been co-opted by various industries, such as .ai (Anguilla) by tech companies, .fm (Federated States of Micronesia) by radio stations. See Country code top-level domains with commercial licenses - Wikipedia - although whilst that does include .cc, it doesn’t mention the use by cycling websites. Maybe that should be resolved…
I have no evidence to confirm this, but I’m not entirely convinced that Rapha were the first to adopt the .cc in reference to ‘cycling/cycle club’. Happy to be proven wrong, though…
Regardless, I chose .cc over ‘.bike’ for my own website, and I’m a workshop - go figure.
Interesting stuff @wade_wallace. I first came across the .cc domain when Australian female fashion brand Cue first went online, and had the domain cue.cc - for Cue Clothing Company.
Like some others I wondered where the .cc came from but never bothered to investigate further
The most notable country TLD is Tuvalu with .tv - I remember seeing a stat that the licensing revenues for websites around the world account for over 10% of the nation’s GDP!
I wonder if Anguilla will get close in the near-future with their .ai domain…
As for the cycling world, there are actually a couple of Strava segments showing on the Cocos Islands!
