NextFin News - French prosecutors have opened a formal investigation into the sudden reappearance of digital infrastructure linked to the "Coco" chat platform, the unmoderated site that facilitated the decade-long drugging and mass rape of Gisèle Pelicot. The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed on Wednesday that the probe targets new domains, including Cocoland.cc, for the dissemination of violent and pornographic content accessible to minors. This legal escalation follows reports that nearly identical clones of the original site, which was shuttered by authorities in June 2024, have begun drawing significant traffic from users seeking the same registration-free anonymity that enabled Dominique Pelicot to recruit more than 50 strangers for his crimes.
The original platform, Coco.gg, was cited in more than 23,000 criminal reports before its seizure. Its founder, Isaac Steidl, was charged in January 2025 with the distribution of child pornography and organized crime offenses, though he continues to deny any involvement with the newly emerged iterations. According to Julien Zanatta, Steidl’s legal counsel, his client has no connection to the "Cocoland" domains. However, the speed with which these clones have populated the French web suggests a resilient, decentralized infrastructure that continues to evade the reach of European digital safety regulations.
The reappearance of the site has triggered a sharp political backlash in Paris. Sarah El Haïry, the high commissioner for childhood, characterized the situation as a "collective failure" of digital oversight. Journalists from BFM TV, conducting an undercover investigation, reported that they were able to access the new platform in seconds without age verification. Posing as a 13-year-old girl, the investigators were immediately targeted by adult users with sexually explicit messages, even after the users were informed of the minor's age. This evidence has prompted El Haïry to file additional complaints against two other hosting platforms that provide the technical backbone for these open chatrooms.
From a regulatory standpoint, the "Coco" case highlights the persistent "whack-a-mole" challenge facing the French government. While the original site was hosted abroad to circumvent local laws, the new domains appear to be utilizing similar offshore hosting strategies. The Paris prosecutor's office is now focusing on the intermediaries—the hosting providers and domain registrars—that allow these sites to remain operational. This approach mirrors broader European efforts to hold infrastructure providers liable for the content they facilitate, a move that has met with resistance from civil liberties groups who argue it could lead to over-censorship.
The timing of the investigation is particularly sensitive as France continues to grapple with the judicial fallout of the Pelicot trial. In December 2025, 49 men were sentenced alongside Dominique Pelicot for their roles in the abuse of Gisèle Pelicot, many of whom testified that they met on a Coco chatroom titled "Without her knowledge." The fact that a nearly identical digital environment has returned to the public web within months of those convictions has intensified calls for more aggressive technical intervention, including DNS filtering and ISP-level blocking.
While the French government has vowed to shut down the new sites, technical experts remain skeptical of a permanent solution. The decentralized nature of the modern web allows for rapid domain hopping, where a site can reappear under a new suffix within hours of a takedown. As of Wednesday afternoon, while Cocoland.cc appeared to have been taken offline, several mirror sites remained accessible to French IP addresses. The investigation remains ongoing, with authorities seeking to identify the financial trails and server locations of the new operators.
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