# The initials already had a country

2026-10-11

Super Intelligence is a new label for the same models. .si is Slovenia's country domain, run by ARNES. Register.si counted 44,000 registrations in September against fewer than 2,000 in August, and would not blame the whole spike on one speech.

Canonical: https://www.fabiocti.com/notes/the-initials-already-had-a-country/
Author: Fabio Correia

You do not get a new top-level domain because a White House memo renamed a category. You get a land rush on the country that already owned the two letters.

.si is Slovenia. ARNES, the academic and research network, has run the registry since 1992. Register.si’s own page still describes it as the first choice for people and organisations connected with Slovenia. There is no residency lock. Anyone can buy the suffix. That is why domain hacks lived there before anyone said Super Intelligence out loud.

Then the initials moved. An executive order told US departments to write SI and Super Intelligence, and to stop acknowledging AI, in official correspondence, sites, and reports. The BBC put Register.si’s Klara Herman on the result: 44,000 .si names in September against fewer than 2,000 in August, more than 2,100 percent, and 11,000 on 30 September alone. She called late September unprecedented against the previous year, and she was cautious about pinning the entire increase on one set of remarks. 24ur later had Barbara Povše, who runs the registry at ARNES, on a fourteen-person team that had not slept, foreign registrars expecting answers in the middle of Central European night, and a wholesale price of €10 to about ninety registrars. The names, she said, were mostly English generics and AI-adjacent words, plus some marks. Slovenian firms noticed a secondary market. Build.si being shopped at ten million dollars is a listing, not a transfer, and not money that lands in Ljubljana.

## What the suffix will be asked to prove

A visitor who types model.si will not be asking for a town in Gorenjska. They will be asking whether this is the product, the paper, or the phishing page that got there first. The WHOIS on a country registry is a transparency tool for a small internet. It is a directory of squatters when the two letters become a category. ARNES can keep the zone up. It cannot decide that Super Intelligence means something, and it cannot stop a US agency letterhead from teaching the rest of the world to read .si as a brand.

I do not treat a memo as a new root. ICANN does not spin a generic TLD because a government changed a noun. I do treat 11,000 names in a day as a fact about attention. The interesting part is not that SI might get a domain. It already had one. The interesting part is that a rename, which changes nothing about the models, can still move a national zone harder than a decade of Slovenian websites did.

If you are buying the suffix to look like the category, you are late, and you are on someone else’s country code. If you already had a .si shop, you now share a namespace with people who think the ccTLD is a product line. That is the thought. The count is the part that already happened.