Taylor Swift’s haters are gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate… but they won’t be doing it using the domain names TaylorSwift.porn or TaylorSwift.adult. As CNN reports, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has opened up a limited window for celebrities and companies to buy up generic top-level domains such as “.porn” and “.sucks” before the general public can swoop in and get them this coming June. In addition to Taylor Swift, it seems that Microsoft has also gotten into the action and has already bought Office.porn and Office.adult as well.
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It’s not hard to figure out why brands are willing to buy these domains even if they have no intention of ever filling them up with content — they know that if they don’t, the Internet’s endless reservoir of trolls most certainly will. This means that Taylor Swift and other singers could own their own .porn and .sucks domains and keep them content-free, or they could wait until some twerps on 4chan save up their allowance money and buy it instead.
“People who have bad intentions are going to do what they’re going to do and there’s nothing to prevent that,” Steve Miholovich, SVP of marketing at domain registrar Safenames, tells CNN.
