Revealed: who’s really running Epik

Scandal-rocked registrar Epik promised to turn over a new leaf when it got acquired last year, and now the guy in charge of the domains business — a familiar face to many– has broken cover and talked to DI about the company’s recent woes and turnaround plans.

That guy is director of domains Christopher Ambler, a thirty-year veteran of the industry, who came out of stealth mode today to talk about how he wants to kill Epik’s reputation as a refuge for far-right hate and regain the trust of its customers.

Ambler is perhaps best-known as the founder and CEO of Image Online Design, the company that offered a .web gTLD in an alt-root in the 1990s. More recently, until 2021 he also spent seven years as principal software architect at GoDaddy.

Ambler says he joined Epik’s new owner, Registered Agents Inc, which specializes in company formation services, in November 2022, with a remit to scratch-build a registrar to offer the company’s clients online presence services.

“The basic story is boring as hell,” Ambler said. “Registered Agents does business formations… the company just decided it made sense to be a registrar. They brought me on a year and a half ago with the idea to just build this thing from scratch.”

About six or seven months into this project, in June 2023, Registered Agents decided it could cut a couple of years of development time by simply acquiring the assets of an existing registrar, Ambler said, and Epik’s were up for grabs.

At the time, Epik was on the ropes, rocked by a financial mismanagement scandal under then-CEO Rob Monster that had led to registries disconnecting it for non-payment and an ICANN probe that put it at risk of losing its accreditation and going out of business.

Registered Agents paid $5 million for the registrar and set about paying off the registries and getting the ICANN accreditation transferred to the new owners, from Monster’s Epik Inc to the new Epik LLC.

Due to the nature of Registered Agents’ business — it sets up companies for people, often anonymously and not always to nice people — theories abounded, notably on the Namepros discussion forum, that the new owner was just a front for Monster.

“I totally get the whole ‘We think this is Rob Monster pulling another shady deal’ thing, and I don’t know this for a fact but if I were ICANN I would have thought that was entirely a possibility,” Ambler said. “But they went over it with a fine toothed comb and a microscope.”

Quite apart from the business mismanagement, Epik came with a tonne of reputational baggage. It had long been known as a safe haven for far-right bullies, with the likes of Gab.com, The Daily Stormer, InfoWars and Kiwi Farms among its customer base.

Ambler, who describes himself as “kind of a hippy”, culturally Jewish with spiritual leanings toward Buddhism, was not comfortable with this legacy.

While the new Epik did not publicly disassociate itself from these customers until early 2024, Ambler said the decision was made much sooner.

“When the deal was signed to buy Epik we knew on that day we were no longer the ‘free speech registrar’, we were not the right-wing registrar,” he said. “That’s what the old Epik did, I personally don’t agree with that.”

He compared the gear-shift to the day he interviewed at GoDaddy over a decade ago and made it clear he wasn’t happy working for the company if it was still running the “sexist” TV ads it was famed for in the noughties, which by then it had discontinued.

“When I was told we’re looking at buying [Epik’s] assets, the first thing I said was ‘Okay, but there is some dumpster fire involved here, we’re not going to keep that, right?’ and everybody said ‘No’,” Ambler said. “Absolutely everybody was completely on-board.”

The company then set about “politely inviting” its more controversial customers to take their business elsewhere and shutting down any customers involved in outright illegality, such as unlicensed pharmacies, publishing child sexual abuse material or hate speech that crossed the line into incitement to violence.

“I wouldn’t say it was a significant portion of the business, but it was certainly non-zero,” Ambler said. Hundreds of customers were “shown the door”, he said.

“One of things that angsts me is when you look at the online talk about Epik a lot of people still to this day think Epik is the right-wing registrar, because there’s so much stuff out there from years and years ago,” he said.

“People think Epik is the refuge of the white supremacists,” he said. “I really want to combat that message.”

Ambler said he also oversaw a security review of Epik’s code, following a major breach in 2021.

“We went nuts on security for the first couple months, just making sure everything was safe,” he said.

Was it?

“It is now,” he said.

Since the takeover, Epik has lost hundreds of thousands of domains as customers, fed up with its earlier antics and/or suspicious of the new owners, transferred to other registrars.

At its peak in August 2022, the company had 808,160 gTLD domains under management. By March 2024, the most recent month for which we have records, that number had dropped to 265,845, a loss of over half a million names.

“I daresay we’ve bottomed out at this point and actually have net positives on a number of metrics, but we kind of expected that,” Ambler said.

“Keep in mind that the peak of Epik was mostly accomplished by Rob Monster selling domains at a huge loss to create more appearance of growth,” he added. “That was his goal. He wanted to show that Epik was growing by leaps and bounds, but the company was taking losses left and right.”

Looking forward, Epik is focusing less on being the “be-all and end-all” to domain investors and more on being a solid “world class” retail registrar and selling to Registered Agents’ million-plus existing customers.

Ambler’s final messages to DI readers?

“First, we’re not the right-wing registrar, so please don’t confuse us with the old Epik,” he said, “Second, I’m terribly sorry it’s more boring than a lot of people seemed to think.”

“I’d love to get out there and tell people we’re the good guys now,” he said.

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Tagged: epik, ICANN, registered agents