Forty-four thousand in a month
Slovenia’s national domain registry recorded 44,000 new .si registrations in September, against fewer than 2,000 in August — an increase of more than 2,100%. On 30 September alone, 11,000 were taken.
“Unprecedented” is how Register.si spokeswoman Klara Herman described the late-September activity compared with the previous twelve months. September, she said, stood out “very clearly” against the other months of the year, though she was cautious about attributing the whole rise to a single cause.
Two letters
The cause everyone has reached for is two letters. Donald Trump wants artificial intelligence renamed “super intelligence” — SI — which happens to be the country code Slovenia has used on the internet since the early 1990s.
Where the renaming came from
Trump called for the change in his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September. “The use of the word artificial makes it sound fake,” he said. “It’s not fake, it’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful… welcome to the new world of super intelligence.”
On Tuesday he signed an executive order instructing US government departments and agencies to use “SI” and “Super Intelligence” and to stop acknowledging the term AI. The order covers official correspondence, websites, reports and other communications. The signing itself drew attention for a different reason: the printed lines beneath the president’s signature spelled “United States” wrongly, which was widely noted online.
What the buyers are betting on
The most likely explanation for the surge is speculative registration: buying a name cheaply in case it becomes valuable later. It is an old business and a legal one. The domain men.com was bought for $15,000 in 1997 and sold for $1.32m seven years later.
Whether .si becomes the suffix of the super-intelligence era is a different question from whether 44,000 people thought it might. A country-code domain is not a generic one: registries set their own rules, prices and renewal terms, and a two-letter code that means “Slovenia” to every registrar in the world does not stop meaning that because a different government has adopted the initials.
What is worth watching is the renewal rate. Speculative registrations are cheap to make and get expensive to keep, and the number that matters will arrive next September, when 44,000 domains come up for renewal and the registry finds out how many of them anyone still wants.
