Taylor Swift was one of the lucky multimillionaires to get a shot at protecting her #brand recently when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) let her reserve her own porn domains before anyone else could get them. We're really looking forward to see what she'll do with taylorswift.porn!

Rewind a bit. In 2011, ICANN announced they were opening up a new range of generic top level domains (gTLD) because too many folks had .com and .net and .org addresses. Two of these include .sucks and .porn. ICANN allowed a select group of trademark holders to register their own versions of these domains early to prohibit trolls from snapping them up, so nobody can own, say, McDonalds.sucks just to upload a site about all the dubious things McDonalds has been accused of. Then again, if ICANN is gonna let everyone protect the .sucks TLD, what's even the point of having them?

The domains during this sunrise period are pretty expensive relative to usual domains. While you can pick up a .com for eight bucks, to get an early .porn domain you better be ready to spend up to $2500. Still, for Taylor Swift, who allegedly gave up $6mil in leaving Spotify, that's a drop in the .suck-et. 

For super nerds, the ICANN website has a detailed, easily searchable database of applied-for and approved gTLDs. You can see, for example, that a US company called Abbott Laboratories successfully applied for a .abbott gTLD. As of June 1, when the new gTLDs become publicly available, get ready for http://tony.abbott! (Or maybe just tonyabbott.sucks.)

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