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Epik becomes latest owner of DNForum

by — Services 23 Comments

Domain forum finds its fourth owner in five years.

Logo for DNForum.com "The place to talk domains"

Domain name company Epik has acquired DNForum, the company announced before the holiday weekend.

DNForum was once the domain industry’s most active forum but was supplanted by NamePros. The forum went dark in 2016 and was subsequently acquired by George Verdugo and Kevin Faler. The duo then sold the business to Oliver Hoger, John Nguyen and Lars Lima in 2018.

One of the forum’s biggest assets is the user database, which was promoted as 535,000 users when the forum was offered for sale in 2018.

It will be interesting to see what Epik does with the site. Epik employees are very active at rival forum NamePros.

Epik founder Rob Monster gave a hint of what is to come in a post at DNForum this weekend.

Monster said the company is evaluating a way to make the forum community-owned using a cryptocurrency.

Another interesting thing to watch will be how the company moderates the forum. Epik is known for taking a libertarian approach to content, including by providing services to user-generated content platforms kicked off other platforms. In the forum post, Monster notes that it will generally use a light hand for people to link to or upload anything “that is useful in the spirit of reasonable self-governance.” While that statement is in conjunction with a comment about conducting domain business, this will be an area to watch.

Bloomberg writes about Nick Lim and Epik

by — Domain Registrars 68 Comments

Bloomberg publishes a story about Nick Lim, who sold BitMitigate to Epik. 

Cover of Bloomberg profile of Nick Lim

Bloomberg Businessweek cover

Bloomberg has published a profile of Nick Lim, who sold his company BitMitigate to Epik in 2019.

Lim has since left Epik but remains a shareholder. He now spends his time helping sites favored by White supremacists and QAnon followers stay online.

It’s a fascinating story about the 23-year-old who says he is motivated by free speech. Authors William Turton and Joshua Brustein dig into Lim’s background, finding some contradictions in his story.

The story also discusses Epik and Rob Monster. Bloomberg discusses how the company provides services to extremist sites and provides this nugget:

In October, Bloomberg Businessweek emailed Monster, requesting an interview to discuss Epik’s political philosophy and its relationship with Lim. [Rob] Davis, the Epik executive, sent a nine-page response arguing that Epik had been demonized unfairly and had done a great job of combating extremism. Davis accused the news media of trying to destroy the lives of Epik employees and said the interview request itself was part of an attempt to manipulate the 2020 presidential election. “The long and short of it,” he wrote, “is that we don’t give interviews to traitors of our country that participate in attempted coups sponsored by offshore money.” He cc’d close to 100 other recipients, including the Republican chair of the Federal Communications Commission, the antitrust division of the Federal Trade Commission, and Fox News host Sean Hannity.

This will sound familiar to anyone who has received an email from Davis. When PayPal dropped Epik, Davis wrote an open letter mentioning Hollywood pedophiles and Hunter Biden. When GoDaddy terminated its Afternic partnership with Epik, Epik questioned receiving GoDaddy’s letter “two hours after the election was called for Joe Biden.”

And when some domain name investors reacted to an ostensibly racist comment by an Epik representative, Davis sent an email cc’d to the FTC telling people to stop, threatening that he could email 300 million people within 15 seconds.

January’s top domain name stories: Parler, closeouts and more

by — Uncategorized 1 Comment

Here’s a rundown of the top stories and podcasts from the past month.

Logo for Parler

Parler finding a new home (both for its domain and website) was the top story on DNW in January.

Domain name news sometimes follows national and global news, and that was the case in January. The top stories had to do with sites with controversial content having to find new domain name registrars.

Here’s a look back at the top stories on Domain Name Wire last month, as ranked by views:

1. Parler.com domain moves to Epik – The controversial site moved its domain name to registrar Epik shortly after Epik posted a letter sympathizing with its plight.

2. GoDaddy explains AR15 .com boot – GoDaddy kicked gun site AR15.com off the registrar after claiming that the site didn’t take down problematic forum content. The site owners disputed GoDaddy’s characterization. It ended up at Epik.

3. GoDaddy to change closeout auction pricing – GoDaddy’s Dutch auction format for closeout domains will start at $50 instead of $11 beginning in February.

4. Wix changes product name from virus to nicotine – Wix’s Corvid brand name didn’t play well during the pandemic. Its new choice has another problem.

5. Epik continues to bash GoDaddy. GoDaddy says this is why it dropped Epik – Epik penned a post blasting GoDaddy. This is the exact behavior that GoDaddy says caused it to dump Epik from its Afternic network.

Miss a podcast? Listen now:

#322 Digging into Squadhelp – Squadhelp’s founder Darpan Munjal and I dig into the data and how to leverage Squadhelp for domain sales.

#321 Newer domain investors find success – This is a truncated version of a talk hosted by ICA.

#320 Selling Gems – I interview Andrew Miller, seller and/or broker of many valuable domains.

#319 NielsenIQ and domain names – NielsenIQ Chief Marketing Officer Jacqueline Woods explains the company’s branding and acquisition of NIQ.com.

Parler.com domain moves to Epik

by — Domain Registrars 178 Comments

Social media network mainly used by conservative voices moves its domain to registrar Epik.

Logo for Parler

The social media network Parler has moved its domain name from DreamHost to Epik, a domain name registrar known for attracting domain names used by far-right and conspiracy theory websites.

Yesterday, the company issued a statement saying that it had not been in touch with Parler since AWS announced that it was kicking the site off of its platform. The statement criticized tech companies for “deplatforming” and appears to have been an attempt to get Parler’s attention.

Amazon was not the registrar for the domain name; DreamHost is a competing webhost and domain name registrar.

The nameserver records for Parler.com still point to AWS servers, so the site is not active at this time. [Update: Parler has now moved its nameservers to Epik.com. But as of 2:40 PM PST on Monday, the site does not resolve.]

Epik is the registrar for Gab.com, another right-leaning social network that is rapidly scaling in light of last week’s events. The company openly courted Gab when other registrars pushed it off their platforms, which led to a number of similar sites choosing Epik as their registrar.

 

Epik continues to bash GoDaddy. GoDaddy says this is why it dropped Epik

by — Domain Registrars 39 Comments

Epik suggests reasons why GoDaddy might have dropped Epik from its Afternic program, and GoDaddy responds.

Logo for Epik domain name company

When PayPal notified Epik in October that it was terminating its services with the domain name registrar, Epik fired off letters blaming a number of organizations for the move. One of the companies that drew its ire was GoDaddy. Epik published attacks against the domain name registrar and provided contact information for many of its employees.

The next month, GoDaddy terminated its Afternic partnership with Epik, apparently catching Epik by surprise.

Epik went public about the termination, apparently violating the contract it signed with GoDaddy in doing so. Epik seemed to tie GoDaddy’s decision to a number of factors, and oddly questioned receiving GoDaddy’s letter “two hours after the election was called for Joe Biden.”

Yesterday, Epik published another letter about the Afternic termination. It argued that one of the factors leading to the termination was that Epik was reporting security issues with the platform.

I reached out to GoDaddy yesterday to see if the company would provide any information about its decision to terminate the partnership with Epik.

Paul Nicks, GoDaddy VP, Domains – Investors and Corporate, issued this statement in response:

Once again, Epik has lobbed baseless accusations against us. To be crystal clear, Epik has not provided us with reports of “repeated Afternic security issues.” If anyone has any concerns about our systems, we work closely with them to answer any questions or resolve issues. This is how a real partnership works.

The reason Epik was dropped has everything to do with their constant attacking of us. We don’t feel the need to partner with someone who time and time again casually lies about a wide variety of issues.

We will not be providing further statements on their business, and reserve the right to explore any and all possible legal options to defend against their baseless claims.

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