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US President Donald Trump’s push to rebrand artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” or SI has sparked a flurry of requests for internet domains ending in “.si,” much to Slovenia’s surprise.
“The word ‘artificial intelligence’ makes it sound fake,” Trump told the UN General Assembly last week, saying that SI “sounded much better”.
He added the US would start using “the much more accurate term ‘super intelligence, SI'” for its official documents.
It so happens that .si is the main suffix for Slovenia’s internet domain names registry, meant to denote a website originates from the small Alpine country of some 2.1 million.
“Since the speech, there has been a strong but stable increase of requests for the use of the ‘.si’ domain,” said Klara Herman, spokeswoman for Register.si, which manages Slovenia’s domain names.
The agency has registered an average of 3,700 new domains per day since Trump’s speech — compared with around 3,500 for the whole month of August — pushing the total to more than 220,000 as of Tuesday.
In a statement on its website, the agency “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.”
This is not the first time that a domain from the Balkans became popular with users around the world.
For years, Montenegro’s suffix .me has been often used to denote a personal or call-to-action websites, such as t.me — Telegram messaging app’s official short domain.
Additional sources • AFP