Slovenia’s flag in Bled, September 2023. Image: Joe Passe / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped
.jpg){kind=link}
Donald Trump’s order to rename artificial intelligence has set off a rush for Slovenian web addresses. Slovenia’s domain registry, Register.si, says 46,066 .si domains were registered in the past month, and 12,272 in the 24 hours to Saturday morning, because to a lot of people “.si” now reads as “Super Intelligence”.
In August, fewer than 2,000 were registered. The registry now counts 264,105 .si domains in total. It has started publishing growth figures regularly and says its systems are coping with the load.
From a UN speech to a gold rush #
The interest began in September, when, according to the registry, Trump floated new names for AI on social media, including “Superior Intelligence”. He then told the UN that the US would call it “superintelligence” because “artificial” made it sound fake. On September 29 he made it official with an executive order telling federal agencies to say “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “AI”.
The order is what turned a trickle into a flood. In a notice announcing that .si had passed 200,000 domains, the registry said the debate over a new name for AI had driven interest, along with speculation about what the acronym could mean for Slovenia’s national domain. A registry spokesperson, Klara Herman, told the BBC that about 44,000 .si addresses were registered in September, up 2,199% on August, though Herman was cautious about putting all of it down to Trump.
Hostinger, one of the biggest sellers, says it registered about 4,300 .si domains on September 30, the day after the order, and about 5,400 on October 1, making .si its second most popular ending after .com, according to TechCrunch. More than half of its buyers were in the US and India.
Who is buying them? #
Not many AI companies, it seems. Hostinger told TechCrunch that only around 3% of the .si names registered with it are clearly about AI; most don’t fit any category at all. Some buyers are simply protecting their names. Kim Than, chief executive of Genius PR, told TechCrunch the company bought the .si version of its name “to protect the brand in case this takes off like .ai.”
That comparison explains the appeal. Anguilla’s .ai ending became one of the most valuable on the internet as the AI boom took off, and Hostinger charges about $90 for a .ai name, with a two-year minimum, against about $12 a year for .si. Hostinger only started selling .si on September 23, the day after the UN speech, and its head of domains, Klaudijus Januitis, told Foreign Policy:
Nearly all of our .si orders are new registrations, not transfers from other providers.
Klaudijus Januitis, head of domains at Hostinger, to Foreign Policy
Slovenia says it isn’t getting rich #
Slovenia, the country where Melania Trump was born, won’t make a fortune from the craze, its registry says. Register.si is part of Arnes, a public institute, and sells .si only through about 90 Slovenian and foreign registrars, never directly. Every registrar pays the same flat fee of €10 a domain (about $12), and what buyers pay on top is up to the registrar. Speculation in the media about Slovenia earning millions has no real basis, the registry said.
It did have one piece of advice: anyone who owns a brand, slogan or company name should register the .si version as soon as possible, before someone else does.
Why it matters #
A presidential order about wording has turned into real money for domain sellers and a scramble for names that may never be used. The registry’s own figures show how fast it happened, and how little of it has to do with AI: most buyers are betting on a label catching on, not building anything with it.
Sources: Register.si, “Število domen pod .si preseglo 200.000” and “Spremljajte rast števila domen .si”; Register.si statistics (checked October 3); White House executive order; TechCrunch; Foreign Policy; BBC.