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.
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.
Read next: Watch a Kids Hospital Perform the Most Heartwarming Taylor Swift Lip Synch Ever
Listen to the most important stories of the day.
- The Fall of Roe and the Failure of the Feminist Industrial Complex
- What Trump Knew About January 6
- The Ocean Is Climate Change’s First Victim and Last Resort
- Column: 6 Proven Ways to Reduce Gun Violence
- Ads Are Officially Coming to Netflix. Here's What That Means for You
- Jenny Slate on the Unifying Power of a Well-Heeled Shell Named Marcel
- Column: The FDA's Juul Ban May Not be a Pure Public Health Triumph
- What the Supreme Court’s Abortion Decision Means for Your State