Donald Trump's push to rename AI may be behind an "unprecedented" rise in domain name registrations in Slovenia, according to its official national registry.
The numbers
The US president wants AI to be called "super intelligence" — SI, the same two letters used by Slovenian websites.
Register.si spokeswoman Klara Herman said 44,000 web addresses with the .si suffix were registered in September, compared with fewer than 2,000 in August — an increase of more than 2,100%. She said the scale of activity in late September was unprecedented against the previous twelve months.
Trump called for the technology to be renamed during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on 11 September.
What it means in Bangladesh
This is a small story about a large and recurring pattern: a two-letter country code stops being about the country.
It has happened before, and the precedents are instructive. Tuvalu's .tv became television. Montenegro's .me became a pronoun. Anguilla's .ai became the single most valuable coincidence in domain history, reportedly earning the island tens of millions a year — enough to matter against its national budget. Libya's .ly became an adverb, until the political risk of registering under a Libyan registry became apparent to the companies using it.
That last one is the Bangladeshi reading, and it is a caution rather than an opportunity. .bd has no accidental English meaning and will never attract this kind of speculative demand, so there is no windfall to chase. What the Libyan case shows is the other side: a domain is a dependency on a foreign registry's rules, politics and uptime.
Which is worth saying plainly, because Bangladesh's own registry has the opposite problem. Registering a .com.bd has historically required documentation and manual approval, which is why so many Bangladeshi businesses simply use .com instead. A national domain that is harder to obtain than a global one is a national domain that does not get used, and the sovereignty argument for having one disappears if nobody can be bothered.
The speculative lesson is also real and mostly negative. Forty-four thousand registrations are overwhelmingly bets, not businesses. Most will not renew. Anyone in Bangladesh tempted by the same logic — buying names against a rumoured trend — is buying a renewal obligation on an asset with no traffic, which is the oldest way to lose money on the internet.
