This approach isn’t all about image. It’s a good move, based on protecting herself from the universal crap factory and her search credentials. In the modern “music industry”, you are who you are online. A search will only get her stuff, on this basis, not the sleazefest of association with famous names.
According to some, the .porn suffix is likely to get a lot of troll sites big money, with a few bucks buying anyone’s name with .porn attached. Interestingly, Microsoft bought Office.porn and Office.adult, too. You can just imagine a pornographic Office assistant, can’t you? Too classy for words.
Swift is a rather ironic figure in the “holier than everyone except our lawyers” music business. She’s a pop singer, not a heavy, and she’s doing all the work the so-called heavyweights and self righteous should be doing. Swift previously endeared herself to a lot of people by telling the highly debatable Spotify to go to hell and pulling her songs off it, probably taking millions of hits with her. Spotify is currently getting a lot of anger from musicians and labels for its free streaming service, and many musicians are apparently less than happy with the service in terms of returns.
This was an unusual case of a famous person genuinely creating useful precedents for an industry in business terms. Swift is a sufficiently high profile to force people to take notice, and her tasteful if appropriate kick in the head to Spotify has evidently acted as a wakeup call to the industry.
(Spotify says it now has 15 million subscribers despite the Swift uprising. It also dropped its fees dramatically, up to 90% for 3 months, and about 87% for families. Gesundheit. That sort of money is like a paper umbrella against a volcano, if any legal fur starts flying over streaming rights.)
The new move, however, raises another question apart from an Internet prepared to exploit any damn thing it can think of – Who the hell asked for sites called .porn and .adult? The only thing to be said for it is that at least the name says porn. OK, it makes money for desperate domain name providers and trolls and other invaluable vermin, but what possible use is it to anyone else?
Like the net needs more porn. Does this make any damn thing OK online, as long as it has the right suffix? Look at the trouble Facebook has had managing rogue pages.
Never mind the morality, as if there was such a thing online. Vegetables click on what vegetables like. They’ll go and look at porn whatever it’s called. This is just another market commodity, sleaze and tat in monetizable form. Great for classification, though – If you’re unbelievably naïve.
Nor will it work, if the idea is to create a safety zone. You can see any kid finding workarounds for parental blocks in seconds, with a roadmap of sites to find. Slap an R rating on something, and what happens? Even the most dire of garbage becomes a must-see.
Add to this the fact that specious porn is everywhere without .porn or .adult suffixes. Swift is right to stop the problem, but should there be a problem at all? Exploitative URLs aren’t a great move. How about .snuffmovie or .crime URLs? Good, or bad? Time to go, before they come up with any more garbage like this. I say, sue anyone who registers your name or corporate name with either suffix. Enough of this sleazy free lunch they’ve dreamed up for themselves.
