To prevent misuse of her name and image by opportunistic purveyors of adult content, Taylor Swift’s publicity team reportedly bought TaylorSwift.porn and TaylorSwift.adult before they became available to the public on June 1.
From that date, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will release new top-level domain names to the public, ranging from the innocuous .coffee or .report, to more colorful suffixes like .adult or .sucks. The move is part of a plan, announced in 2011, to make domains more helpful and descriptive, and to make filtering easier.
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There are now some 1,300 new domains in the works, forming an alternative to the standard .com, .net or .org. Many are in Arabic, Russian, Mandarin and other languages besides English.
Celebrities like Swift and big brands have been racing to snap up domains in advance of the June 1 release, with Microsoft, for instance, acquiring Office.porn and Office.adult.
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