NEW YORK — The singer Taylor Swift, Microsoft Corp. and Harvard University are among those buying up .porn and .adult Web suffixes as a pre-emptive move before those domain names become available this summer.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is making Internet address suffixes beyond the usual .com or .org available for people and businesses to use. While some are in Chinese or other languages besides English, others could include the likes of .music, .app or, of course, .porn.
To check what brands, groups and celebrities have bought their domain names, visit http://icmregistry.com/domaincheck . According to the site, Microsoft has bought not only Microsoft.porn but Office.porn and Office.adult as well.
Representatives for Taylor Swift, Microsoft and Harvard could not immediately be reached for comment.