Epik (company)

In February 2019, it was announced that Epik had acquired BitMitigate, an American cybersecurity company based in Vancouver, Washington. BitMitigate protects websites against potential threats including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The company continues to operate as a division of Epik, and BitMitigate's founder Nicholas Lim briefly served as Epik's chief technology officer.[5]

Epik acquired web hosting company Sibyl Systems Ltd. in the second quarter of 2019.[14][15] Sibyl Systems was founded on October 22, 2018, and according to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was possibly based in Norway or in England.[16][17] Shortly after the company was founded, they began providing hosting services to Gab, which had just been terminated service by its previous web host due to the service's use by the perpetrator of the October 27, 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. Sibyl Systems was described in a February 2019 profile by the SPLC as a "shadowy operation with little transparency on its website, a murky history of ownership and no fixed base of operations".[17]

In October 2020, financial services provider PayPal terminated service for Epik due to financial risk concerns relating to the company's alternative currency called "Masterbucks", which can be used to purchase services from Epik or can be exchanged for U.S. currency.[18] Mashable alleged that PayPal's concerns were related to the potential for money laundering, and that PayPal terminated service because Epik allegedly had not taken the proper legal steps to offer an alternate currency after being made aware of the issue a month prior. Mashable also reported that the termination was partly due to concerns by PayPal that the site was encouraging tax evasion by advertising the "tax advantages" of using Masterbucks.[18][19] Epik subsequently published what Mashable described as "a series of unhinged open letters" targeting "PayPal, Hunter Biden, Bloomberg News, and several Avengers" and accusing PayPal of terminating service because they were biased against conservatives.[19]

In January 2021, the alt-tech social network Parler transferred its domain name registration to Epik, following the termination of its hosting and support services by other providers on account of it being "overrun" with death threats and celebrations of violence.[30][31] According to Fortune, Epik provided Parler with advice on running the service, including to add more moderators, improve systems to detect harmful posts, and change their terms of service.[9]

On August 5, 2019, Epik competitor Cloudflare announced that in the wake of the 2019 El Paso shooting they would no longer be providing services to 8chan, a far-right imageboard known as a location for hateful content and child pornography,[32][33] which the perpetrator of the shooting had allegedly used immediately prior to the attack to post a manifesto justifying his actions.[34] The same day that 8chan was removed from Cloudflare, Epik began providing hosting services, and Monster released a statement explaining their decision. Later that day, Epik's primary hardware and connectivity provider Voxility banned Epik from renting their server space.[35] Voxility's vice president of business development stated, "We have made the connection that at least two or three of the latest mass shootings in the U.S. were connected with [Epik and BitMitigate]. At some point, somebody needed to make the decision on where the limit is between what is illegal and what is freedom of speech and today it had to be us."[36] The Voxility ban took 8chan offline, along with The Daily Stormer and other Epik customers. On August 6, Epik reversed course and announced that they would not provide hosting services to 8chan; on August 7, Ars Technica noted that Epik had only ceased hosting their content and was still providing 8chan with DNS services.[37][24]

Epik received media attention in early November 2018 for registering Gab, an English-language social media website known for its mainly far-right user base, after it was ousted by GoDaddy for allowing "content on the site that both promotes and encourages violence against people". This came shortly after it was revealed that the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting had used the service to post "hateful content".[2][25][38][39] Tal Moore, a member of Epik's board, resigned in December 2018 over the company's involvement with Gab.[3] On November 7, 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro sent a subpoena to Epik requesting "any and all documents which are related in any way to Gab" after Gab registered its domains onto Epik.[40][20] Gab posted screenshots of the subpoena letter in a tweet on the day the subpoena was sent, despite being asked to keep the letter confidential.[40][20] The tweet was deleted hours later.[40][20] In an email statement to Ars Technica, Monster stated that "the news of the subpoena was not intended for public consumption" and that "we are cooperating with their inquiry".[20] On August 9, cloud hosting provider Linode informed Epik they would be terminating services to the company.[41] As of January 2021, Epik was still providing services to Gab.[42]

Epik provides hosting to Patriots.win, previously known as TheDonald.win, the independent far-right web forum that was created as a successor to the r/The_Donald subreddit banned by Reddit in June 2020.[43][44][45] The website has been labeled "a magnet for extreme discourse" by the Financial Times.[46] It has been likened to other clients of Epik's, Gab and 8chan, as those sites were also created to bypass hate speech policies on more mainstream sites.[47]

According to a January 16, 2021 report from the Wall Street Journal, Epik had threatened to take TheDonald.win offline over the forum failing to remove white supremacist, racist, and violent content. The Journal also reported that Jody Williams, TheDonald.win's owner, had received multiple requests from the FBI for user information due to threatening posts. Williams had struggled to moderate the forum's racist, antisemitic, and violent posts over the prior months, and some of TheDonald.win's volunteer moderators had responded by thwarting Williams's efforts to take down the violent and objectionable content on the forum. Williams and his family had also received daily death threats from the users he banned from the forum.[11] On January 20, 2021, due to an internal power struggle over the TheDonald.win domain between the moderators and Williams, the site was rebranded as Patriots.win.[12] As of January 21, 2021, Epik was still providing services to Patriots.win.[12]

In August 2017, Epik and BitMitigate (an American cybersecurity company later acquired by Epik in 2019) began hosting American neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website The Daily Stormer.[27] This was in response to GoDaddy and Cloudflare terminating services for the site after it published an article mocking Heather Heyer, the victim of the vehicle ramming attack that occurred at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that same month.[52] According to an Epik spokesperson in January 2021, the company had stopped providing services to The Daily Stormer.[9]

Wired wrote in 2018 that Epik has a history of not responding to reports of illegal activity on the websites they register, which the magazine noted is unusual for domain registrars based in the United States.[4] Pharmaceutical watchdog website LegitScript reported in 2018 that they had alerted Epik to the sale of illegal drugs and counterfeit medications on websites registered by Epik, and that Epik had not acted upon the information.[4]