Epik reveals who is running the company

Epik has named the three people it says are running the company following the change of control last June.

They are: JM Spear (identified as president) Jon Garrison (treasurer) and Bryce Myrvang (secretary), according to a recently published page on the company’s web site, which also names Registered Agents Inc as the parent company.

The three men hold the same positions at Registered Agents, according to that company’s web site.

The publishing of the new officers web page follows shortly after ICANN said it would ask Epik to publish such a page last week.

It seems the press release announcing the “acquisition” of Epik by Registered Agents I blogged about yesterday pre-dates ICANN’s approval of the new Epik LLC taking over the registrar accreditation of the old Epik Inc, which followed months of vetting.

So now we know who owns and runs the new Epik, which has committed to regain the trust of customers following a financial scandal and abandon its old devotion to a hard-line “free speech” stance, at least on paper.

The fact that Registered Agents specializes in company formations makes its acquisition of a registrar somewhat plausible, but the fact that its job is often to act as a proxy for its clients’ true beneficiaries means speculation about Epik’s ownership is unlikely to relent immediately.

2 Comments Tagged: acquisitions, epik, ICANN, registered agents

Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…

Epik has announced that it has been acquired and has named at least one person responsible for running the troubled registrar, but the new information is unlikely to satisfy critics or quash the conspiracy theories around the company’s new management.

“Registered Agents Inc., the leading registered agent service provider in the United States, has acquired key assets of internet domain registrar Epik,” the company said in a press release this weekend.

Bryce Myrvang, in-house counsel for Registered Agents, is named in the press release, but his position at Epik is not stated. Neither is it stated when the acquisition occurred — whether it was before or after ICANN approved the transfer of disgraced Epik Inc’s accreditation to Epik LLC last week, or after.

Neither the names Registered Agents or Bryce Myrvang are new information. Myrvang had been listed in ICANN’s registrar contact database after the LLC bought the Inc last June, but that changed last month to a job title rather than a named individual.

Because Registered Agents’ entire raison d’être is anonymous company formation and management, Epik’s past and current customers naturally wondered aloud whether it was in fact just a front for company founder Rob Monster, on whose watch the registrar started to descend into financial controversy, or somebody else with an interest in keeping their name secret.

But last week Epik and ICANN simultaneously announced that ICANN had completed its due diligence on the new company and found it completely independent of its former owners and leadership.

“Epik, LLC is a recently formed entity that is completely independent of Epik, Inc., its leadership, and shareholders,” ICANN told us.

“No previous owners, including Epik Inc founder Rob Monster and late stage CEO Brian Royce, are involved in Epik LLC in any capacity, including ownership interest in the business,” Epik said.

The announcement today that Registered Agents has bought Epik LLC will do little to unmuddy these waters.

For starters, if Myrvang is indeed a lawyer at a company that prides itself on its professionalism and discretion, there’s not a chance in hell he’s in charge of Epik’s Twitter account, which went a bit crazy last month.

There are undoubtedly synergies between a firm that deals in anonymous company formations — reportedly sometimes for dodgy clients — and a registrar that specialized in controversial anchor tenants.

But Epik is now confirming that it’s done a full U-turn on its strategy to court and welcome some of the web’s most distasteful sites and is now positioning itself as a regular workaday registrar with a focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs.

“Since the acquisition, and throughout the ICANN accreditation transfer review, Epik updated its terms of service and worked aggressively to rid its platform of violators. Having removed a handful of problematic clients, Epik can focus on rebuilding trust with its small business and entrepreneurial clients,” the company said in its latest press release.

Epik lost hundreds of thousands of domains under management last year, after a financial mismanagement scandal caused customers to lose confidence and flee in droves.

3 Comments Tagged: acquisition, epik, ICANN, registered agents

Airline gTLD crashes and burns

Another would-be dot-brand has added itself to the list of “On second thoughts…” gTLD registries, asking ICANN to tear up its contract.

Century-old Avianca, Colombia’s largest airline, filed its termination papers with ICANN in December and ICANN published them for comment last week.

While the original 2012 application clearly stated that .avianca was intended as a single-registrant dot-brand, Avianca never actually got around to applying for its Spec 13 exemptions so I won’t be technically counting it as a dead dot-brand.

Despite being operational since early 2016, the TLD never had any registrations beyond the mandatory nic.avianca registry placeholder.

The back-end registry services provider and original application consultant was Identity Digital (née Afilias).

Comment Tagged: .avianca, dot-brands, ICANN, identity digital, termination

First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop

ICANN has released for comment the first public drafts of seven sections of the new gTLD program’s Applicant Guidebook, the first of what are expected to be quarterly comment periods for the next 18 months or so.

As I previewed last week, the documents cover topics including geographic names, blocked strings, Universal Acceptance, conflicts of interest and freedom of expression.

The documents were prepared by the ICANN staff/community Subsequent Procedures Implementation Review Team, based on the recommendations of a working group reporting to the Generic Names Supporting Organization a few years ago.

ICANN says it wants to know whether everyone thinks the AGB text it has come up with is consistent with those recommendations.

The comment period is open until March 19. ICANN hopes to have the full AGB ready by May 2025, with the next application round opening April 2026.

Comment Tagged: agb, ICANN, new gTLDs, next round, subpro

Epik to reveal its owners soon

The new Epik registrar has been asked to reveal the identities of its officers and owners shortly, I’ve learned.

The company last night revealed that it had passed through ICANN’s due diligence process, over six months after Epik LLC bought the assets of Epik Inc following a long financial mismanagement scandal, allowing it to take over its corporate predecessor’s accreditation.

Epik said the ICANN process had confirmed that Epik Inc founder Rob Monster and final CEO Brian Royce were not involved in Epik LLC in any way, but the company did not reveal who the owners or managers of the new company are.

I asked ICANN whether this was kosher under the Registrar Accreditation Agreement, which obliges all registrars to publish the names and positions of their officers, as well as the names of any ultimate parent entity, on their web sites.

“We are reminding them of that obligation and expect it to be addressed shortly,” ICANN vice president Russ Weinstein told us.

Breaches of the RAA can lead to suspension or termination of the contract, but I don’t believe ICANN has ever initiated public Compliance proceedings against a registrar based solely on a relatively minor infraction.

Regardless, it seems that after half a year of mystery, the speculation may very well come to an end soon.

3 Comments Tagged: epik, ICANN, raa

Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD

D3 Global, the new gTLD consultancy specializing in cryptocurrency and blockchain clients, has signed up its third public client.

The company plans to help Gate.io apply to ICANN for .gate when the next application round opens, currently expected in 2026, according to a press release today.

Gate.io is a cryptocurrency exchange that claims to have 13 million users worldwide (although it appears to be unavailable in several large markets) that was founded in China 10 years ago.

D3 is a startup founded by some domain industry pioneers that offers companies support with applying for regular gTLDs that can interoperate with blockchain-based naming systems.

It’s already announced deals with companies called Shib and Viction for the strings .shib and .vic.

Comment Tagged: d3, gate.io

Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!

Rob Monster and Brian Royce are no longer involved in the management or ownership of the registrar Epik, according to both Epik and ICANN.

Epik announced tonight that ICANN had completed its due diligence on the new company and approved the transfer of Epik Inc’s registrar accreditation to Epik LLC, following an acquisition in June last year.

Not only that, but it added that the two guys in charge of the Inc during its descent into disgrace in late 2022 and early 2023 are no longer involved with the company.

“No previous owners, including Epik Inc founder Rob Monster and late stage CEO Brian Royce, are involved in Epik LLC in any capacity, including ownership interest in the business,” Epik said (emphasis in original).

I’ve received a confirmation from ICANN. Vice president Russ Weinstein said in a statement:

ICANN has completed its thorough review of the assignment request and of the Assignee, and has determined that the new entity (Epik, LLC) meets the established registrar criteria. Epik, LLC is a recently formed entity that is completely independent of Epik, Inc., its leadership, and shareholders.

ICANN has updated its registrar records to remove the name of Bryce Myrvang as Epik’s primary contact to the generic “Domain Support”. Its phone number has changed from one in Idaho to one in Austin, Texas. Its email address has also changed.

Myrvang, who appeared in ICANN records following the June acquisition, works for a company called Registered Agents Inc, which specializes in anonymous company formations. It was not clear before whether Registered Agents had bought Epik LLC or was just a proxy to hide the true owner.

There had been speculation online that Epik founder Monster or subsequent CEO Royce might have been still secretly controlling Epik, exacerbated last week when the person in charge of Epik’s Twitter account appeared to go nuts, in keeping with both former CEOs’ previous social media behavior.

Who is running Epik, and who owns it, is currently unknown.

Epik fell from grace in late 2022 after a financial mismanagement scandal that saw it withhold money from domain buyers for months. It lost hundreds of thousands of domains as a result.

1 Comment Tagged: epik, ICANN

Nominet to overhaul .uk registry, turn off some services

Nominet has opened a public consultation on its plans to modernize the .uk domain registry, which will involve increased standardization around international norms and turning off some older services.

It’s an extensive consultation — 37 proposals and 92 questions spread over more than 50 pages — aimed mainly at the registrars that will have to update their systems to integrate with the new registry. But registrants will also be affected.

The plans would see changes to Nominet’s underlying registry platform that would alter how renewals, proxy registrations, grace periods and transfers between registrants and registrars are handled, and the retirement of the current Whois system, among many other items.

Nominet reckons its proposals will help it save money on ongoing maintenance and software licensing as well as eventually simplifying things for its member registrars.

The company currently runs two registry platforms in parallel: the old UK registry and the newer EPP registry, which is based on the latest technical standards and compliant with ICANN requirements.

It runs its gTLDs, such as .wales and .cymru, as well as its dozens of back-end clients, on the newer system. The plan is to shift .uk over to the newer RSP platform too.

The proposal also calls for Nominet to align with ICANN’s plans to stop requiring registrars to operate Whois services a year from now, replacing them with the newer RDAP standard, which provides the same functionality.

Other older, less-used services, such as the Domain Availability Checker, would either be retired or replaced with EPP-based equivalents.

There’s a lot to absorb in the consultation documents, but at first glance it strikes me that large international registrars that already integrate with dozens of registries probably don’t have much to worry about; smaller, .uk-focused registrars with fewer resources may show some resistance due to the amount of development work likely to be required.

But Nominet says that it is taking this into account with its timetable, saying: “If the changes go ahead, we will give considerable advance notice to Registrars to allow time for development activities”.

The consultation is open for the next three months, punctuated by five explanatory webinars.

4 Comments Tagged: .uk, nominet

Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime

Another ccTLD has blamed DNSSEC after seeing hours of downtime affecting its country’s biggest web services yesterday.

This time it’s Russia’s ccTLD.ru, which confirmed today that it was responsible for the widely reported outages on Tuesday, which had sparked speculation that a cyber-attack related to the war in Ukraine might be the culprit.

It was rather a DNSSEC failure that affected both .ru and the Cyrillic .рф domains, the registry said. It was related to a cryptograpghic key rollover, the registry indicated.

“After the failure was detected, the updated keys were revoked, and the functionality of the .RU zone was fully restored, which took about two hours, including the distribution of data through the DNS system,” the registry said on its web site.

“The investigation into the incident is currently ongoing, but it is already clear that the main cause of the failure was the imperfection of the software used to create the encryption keys,” it added.

The explanation was echoed by Russian government officials on social media, and it’s sadly rather plausible. DNSSEC failures at ccTLDs, and to a lesser extent gTLDs, usually related to fluffed key rollovers, are rather common.

There have been similar outages reported in the last few years in Australia (twice), Namibia, Fiji, and Sweden. And those are just the ones reported on this blog. People who track this kind of thing more closely have recorded hundreds of incidents.

Comment Tagged: .ru, cctld.ru, DNSSEC, outages

Team Internet says revenue beat estimates

Team Internet gave a preview of its 2023 earnings report this morning, saying that revenue grew faster than its own targets and analysts’ estimates.

The company, formerly CentraNic, expects to post revenue around $835 million, up 15% on 2022, and profit up 12% at $96 million for the year.

The firm’s Online Presence segment, which includes the domains business, had revenue up 16% at $179 million, while the far larger Online Marketing segment saw revenue up 14% at $656 million.

Team Internet will report its full results on March 18.

1 Comment Tagged: centralnic, earnings, financials, team internet