A UN Speech on ‘Super Intelligence’ Sets Off a Run on Slovenia’s .si Domains

The suffix is two letters long. On the internet, .si is the country-code domain of Slovenia, the small Alpine state of some 2.1 million people, the tag that tells the world a website originates there. Since last week, according to euronews, those two letters have acquired a second meaning, at least in the minds of a great many new registrants: super intelligence.

The source of the confusion — or the opportunity, depending on where you sit — was a speech by US President Donald Trump to the UN General Assembly. “The word ‘artificial intelligence’ makes it sound fake,” Trump told the assembly, saying that SI “sounded much better”. He added that the United States would start using “the much more accurate term ‘super intelligence, SI’” in its official documents.

At Register.si, the agency that manages Slovenia’s domain names, the phones and the forms have not stopped. “Since the speech, there has been a strong but stable increase of requests for the use of the ’.si’ domain,” said Klara Herman, the agency’s spokeswoman. The numbers behind the word “strong”: Register.si has registered an average of 3,700 new domains per day since Trump spoke — against roughly 3,500 for the entire month of August — and the total passed 220,000 as of Tuesday.

The registry, plainly reading the same rush everyone else is, has posted a notice saying it “strongly recommends to holders of trademarks, slogans, company names and others who do not yet own a .si domain that they register one as soon as possible.”

The Balkans have been here before. Montenegro’s suffix, .me, has for years been a favourite for personal sites and call-to-action addresses; the Telegram messaging app uses t.me as its official short domain. What is new is the source of the fashion. Montenegro’s letters sold themselves. Slovenia’s needed an American president, a rebranded science, and a coincidence of spelling.

Whether “super intelligence” outlasts the news cycle is not Slovenia’s problem. The domains are registered, the fees are paid, and the two letters still belong, as they always did, to Ljubljana.