Late last month, Donald Trump ordered all U.S. government employees to use the term “superintelligence” instead of artificial intelligence, a move that has led to a surge in domain name registrations for the country’s “.si” zone nominally assigned to Slovenia.
Image source: Unsplash, HD History
Recent directives from the President of the United States insist on using the abbreviation of the term “superintelligence”, which is composed of the letters “SI” and is spelled the same as the domain name of Slovenia. This phenomenon cannot be called a new phenomenon, because at the beginning of the artificial intelligence boom, the small Caribbean island country of Anguilla, where the “.ai” domain belongs, also experienced a similar surge in domain registrations.
In all these cases, national interests benefit because the budget receives royalties from second-level domain name holders in the corresponding region. Ironically, Slovenia is the home country of Donald Trump’s wife Melania, so the US president’s initiative inadvertently benefits the US first lady’s former compatriot.
In September, according to official statistics, the number of secondary domain registrations in the “.si” region increased by 2199%. With 11,000 people registered as of September 30, these statistics can already be safely linked to the actions of the President of the United States. “The hallmark of changing artificial intelligence”. A total of 12,309 new domains were registered in the region in the past 24 hours. If we take into account that at the time of publication, there were a total of 262,267 domain registrations in this region, with an increase of 46,066 registrations in September alone, then we can confidently talk about the serious impact of Trump on the dynamics of domain registrations in the “.si” zone.
Representatives from hosting platform Hostinger commented TechCrunch pointed out that the suffix “.si” is now the second most popular suffix after “.com”. Nearly 4,300 customers chose the first option on September 30 alone, and by October 1, that number had grown to nearly 5,400. These two days accounted for more than three-quarters of the new registrations of “.si” domains since September 23. More than half of the applicants are from the United States and India.
Ironically, according to Hostinger, only 3% of new domains in the region are related to AI by activity type, and the rest are not classified in any way at all. There is inevitably an element of speculation present when people try to reserve a domain name so that they can sell it at a profit in the future to interested potential owners. In some cases, their asking prices have exceeded a million dollars, so business owners are scrambling to reserve the names they need at lower prices.
Domains in the “.si” zone are unlikely to come close to “.ai” in terms of popularity in the foreseeable future, but their demand will certainly be high as they remain a more affordable alternative to the latter. In Slovenia, there is a separate organization that collects domain registration funds, but this money does not go directly into the state budget like in Anguilla. At the same time, the registration fee for the latter is higher – $90 per year, and the minimum lease period is two years. Slovenia’s current limit is US$12 per year.
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