GETTING AN .SI DOMAIN, AND WHY YOU MIGHT WANT ONE

Two letters became valuable last week for a reason that has nothing to do with Slovenia. The United States government decided to stop saying artificial intelligence, and the replacement it picked shares a name with a small country's corner of the internet.

What Actually Happened

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22, Trump said the United States would refer to the technology as super intelligence from now on. His reasoning was about the word itself. The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake, he said. It is not fake. It's actually amazing.

That would have been a line in a speech. Then came the executive order, signed Tuesday, directing every executive branch department and agency to use the terms Super Intelligence and SI in official correspondence, public communications and policy documents, and to stop acknowledging the terms Artificial Intelligence and AI.

Not everyone is convinced it travels. Marketing people pointed out that superintelligence already means something specific in the field, a system past human level, and that the research community is unlikely to hand the word over. Senator Mark Warner was blunter about the substance, saying that changing what we call artificial intelligence does nothing to address the very real risks.

The Part That Moved Money

Slovenia has used .si as its country code domain since the early nineties. It is now the accidental home of a federal branding exercise.

In the 24 hours after the speech, 3,930 new .si domains were registered. For scale, the entire previous month produced 3,515. The registry went from roughly 190,000 domains at the start of September to roughly 219,000 by the 28th, growth north of 15 percent in under a week. Netcraft clocked .si registrations running ahead of .ai, which is the more telling number, because .ai has been the default vanity extension for every model company on earth for three years.

Slovenia is not getting rich off it. The registry charges accredited registrars a flat administrative fee of 10 euros per domain, which works out to something like 300,000 euros extra this month, and Register.si went out of its way to say it does not see the retail markups that registrars charge customers.

How to Actually Get One

The registry is Register.si, run by ARNES, Slovenia's academic and research network. You do not deal with them directly in most cases. You go through an accredited registrar, and Register.si publishes the full list of them.

The rules are unusually open for a country code domain. There is no residency requirement. You do not need a Slovenian company, address or representative. Any legal or natural person can register, anywhere, for a minimum term of one year. Plenty of mainstream registrars carry it already, including EuroDNS, Hostinger, Dynadot, Netim and 101domain, so in practice it is the same checkout flow as any other domain.

Two things to get right. Under the NIS2 directive the registry requires registrant contact data to be accurate, complete and matched to your official documentation for the whole life of the domain, so filling in nonsense details is a genuine way to lose the name later. And if you ever move it, .si transfers require an authcode from your current registrar.

Why You Might Want One

If the rebrand sticks even partially, .si reads as super intelligence to anyone in an American policy context, and the address is short in a way most new extensions are not. Two letter country codes have always been good for domain hacks, and the field of unclaimed SI names has been picked over for about a week rather than a decade. At registry cost it is a cheap option on a naming convention that the federal government has now written into its own paperwork.

Why You Might Not

The rebrand has to survive contact with an industry that did not ask for it. Every serious research group still writes AI, superintelligence already has a different technical meaning, and executive orders govern federal language, not the rest of the world's. If the term does not take, what you own is a Slovenian country domain bought at the top of a hype curve, with renewals due annually.

There is also the part nobody mentions during a land rush. A country code domain is governed by a foreign registry under its own national policy, which is fine until it is not.

The honest read is that this is a cheap bet, not an investment. The people who did well out of .ai bought early and built something on it. The people buying .si this week are mostly buying the initials, and the initials are currently on loan from a naming argument that the industry has not agreed to.