Every internet address ends with an extension. .fr for France, .de for Germany, .com for pretty much everyone. Slovenia has .si.
Until September, apart from Slovenians, nobody was interested. Then a man said two letters.
How it all started
On 19 September, Donald Trump raised on his social network the idea of renaming artificial intelligence. On the 22nd, from the podium of the UN General Assembly, he announced that the United States would henceforth say "superintelligence", or "SI". On the 29th, he signed a decree imposing it on the entire American administration.
Yet SI happens to be Slovenia's internet extension. And Slovenia is Melania Trump's country of birth. Chance sometimes works things out nicely, at least for some.
The rush, in numbers
For most of the year, the Slovenian registry was recording around a thousand new addresses a month. On the day of the UN speech, it received more than 2,000. The next day, more than 4,000.
After the decree was signed, more than 11,000 new .si addresses were registered in a single day. Across the whole of September, registrations jumped by nearly 2,200%. There are now more than 220,000 .si addresses, which is more than one for every ten inhabitants of the country.
Who is buying?
Speculators, mostly. The security firm Netcraft analysed purchases made on a resale platform around the UN speech. More than half of the .si addresses registered during those few days were immediately put back up for sale. Among them were names such as donaldjtrump.si or boeing.si, bought by unknown individuals hoping to resell them at a high price.
Companies, too. Major tech brands are starting to reserve their name in .si, to prevent someone else from doing it in their place. The Slovenian registry itself advises trademark holders to protect their name.
And sometimes scammers. An address that imitates a major brand can be used to set up a fake login page. With phishing exploding, every fashionable new extension is a windfall for fraudsters.
This is not the first time a small country has benefited from a coincidence of letters. The extension of the island of Anguilla, in the Caribbean, is .ai. With the artificial intelligence wave, thousands of companies have scrambled for .ai addresses, and this island of around 15,000 inhabitants now draws tens of millions of dollars a year from it, a significant share of its budget. Before it, the archipelago of Tuvalu had the same experience with .tv, coveted by television channels.
Will Slovenia make a fortune?
Not so fast. The Slovenian registry itself has calmed things down: according to it, speculation about millions in revenue for the country rests on nothing. A .si address costs little, and the wave could subside as quickly as it arrived, if the word "superintelligence" does not take hold outside the American administration.
What we take away
There is something dizzying about this story. A president changes a word in a speech, and thousands of miles away, a small internet registry sees its sales explode within hours.
It is proof that words have become assets, bought and resold. Last week we asked what difference it makes to rename a thing. Here is an unexpected answer: for some, it pays.