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Taylor Swift applies for her .post domain

A back-up in case the whole music thing doesn’t work out?

Taylor Swift has become the first celebrity to attempt to defensively register her name in the .post gTLD, which is currently in the middle of a newly extended and incredibly belated sunrise period.

According to the registry’s web site, the domain taylorswift.post has been applied for by DNStination, a MarkMonitor subsidiary used to register names on behalf of clients.

The .post relaunch is pretty unusual in that all sunrise period applications are being published on the registry’s new web site, with a user-friendly form for challenging them.

About 60 domains have been approved since sunrise kicked off in mid-March and about the same amount are currently in their 30-day challenge period. For context, .post had barely 400 domains under management prior to the current relaunch, despite having been live in the DNS for 12 years.

The usual suspects such as Meta, Google and Amazon, as well as many national postal services, have all participated in the sunrise, which is open to all trademark holders regardless of their nexus to the logistics or postal industries.

But after the sunrise period is over and the new general availability regime begins, .post is only supposed to be for any entity “interested in participating in the postal, logistics or supply chain sectors”, so it’s difficult to see how a future cybersquatter might have been able to abuse Swift’s brand.

It’s probable that MarkMonitor is under instruction to “just register everything”. Swift is a multi-billion-dollar brand and the internet has no shortage of scumbags trying to rip off her millions of adoring fans.

That said, Swift’s domain application has another two weeks left on the challenge clock, so if you’re Team Kanye, or simply find her music nauseating…

Obama, Apple, cancer and Taylor Swift’s cat top lists of most searched-for .sucks domains

You’ve got to hand it to .sucks registry Vox Populi.
The pricing may be “exploitative” and “predatory”, as the intellectual property community believes, but damn if the the company doesn’t know how to generate headlines.
Vox Pop has just added a new ticker stream to its web site, fingering the 50 most sucky celebrities, politicians, companies, social ills and abstract concepts.
The lists have been compiled from “more than a million” searches for .sucks domains that Vox Pop has seen pass through its system, according to CEO and veteran PR man John Berard.
For some reason, TayloySwiftsCat.sucks is the most searched-for in the “Personalities” category.
I’m guessing this relates to a meme that has yet to reach my isolated, middle-aged, non-country-music-loving corner of the world.
Whatever the cat did to earn this ire, it’s presumably equivalent to what Barack Obama, Apple, cancer and just life generally has done to searchers on the .sucks web site.
Here are the lists of most-searched-for terms, as it stands on the .sucks web site right now.
Top Personalities:

  • 1. TaylorSwiftsCat
  • 2. JustinBeiber
  • 3. KevinSpacey
  • 4. Oprah
  • 5. KimKardashian
  • 6. KayneWest
  • 7. GuyFieri
  • 8. TomBrady
  • 9. DonaldTrump
  • 10. OneDirection

Catch Phrases:

  • 1. Life
  • 2. YourMomma
  • 3. This
  • 4. Everyone
  • 5. MyJob
  • 6. MyLife
  • 7. Reality
  • 8. YouKnowWhat
  • 9. Who
  • 10. College

Causes:

  • 1. Cancer
  • 2. Technology
  • 3. Obesity
  • 4. Racism
  • 5. Depression
  • 6. Meat
  • 7. AIDS
  • 8. Hate
  • 9. Poverty
  • 10. Government

Companies:

  • 1. Apple
  • 2. Google
  • 3. Microsoft
  • 4. Facebook
  • 5. Comcast
  • 6. Walmart
  • 7. CocaCola
  • 8. McDonalds
  • 9. Sony
  • 10. Amazon

Politicians:

  • 1. Obama
  • 2. Hillary
  • 3. TedCruz
  • 4. RandPaul
  • 5. StephenHarper
  • 6. Putin
  • 7. JebBush
  • 8. TonyAbbott
  • 9. DavidCameron
  • 10. Democrats

Make no mistake, this is a headline-generating exercise by Vox Pop.
It comes as .sucks hits 10 days left on the clock for its $1,999+-a-pop sunrise period.
The company got a shed-load of mainstream media publicity when celebrities, starting with Kevin Spacey, started registering their names in .sucks several weeks ago.
It’s looking to get more headlines now, from lazy journalists and bloggers.
This is one of the first, for which I can only apologize.