A
PRO badge is quite literally an
endorsement of an individual. It's not a objective thing where you hit certain numbers and boom you're a pro. It's also based on standing in the community, character, integrity, etc. It surprises me how any entity in the domaining world would choose to continue to endorse this. But I thought the same thing 2, 3, maybe even 4 years ago so life is full of surprises.
This whole mess, in its totality, should have only been a stain on Epik and it's board members, investors, partners, all the people who ran the weird little side-projects, all the attack-dogs and people who volunteered their time for free to attack and harass people who would speak up, everyone who continued to profit even when they could tell something was wrong here...
It didn't have to get this bad. We allowed it to.
But instead of merely being a stain on Epik & co., it's exposing a lot of issues with domaining as a whole, not just with Epik.
- How long will Epik remain in good standing with ICAAN?
- How many people are being scammed on .tv's at Epik, for example, that don't know anyone on a forum who can help them get in touch with the right people at GoDaddy (the leading brain in our industry, like it our not)?
- How many customers, who don't read forums, are going to lose their domains and renewal fees until ICAAN does something?
- How many new "Escrow" transactions are being set up each day that the sellers will never get paid for?
- Where are all the people who were pretending this was a real escrow service and vouching for it up and down?
- How many people are continuing to list their portfolios, unknowing that they'll never be paid for their sales?
This really doesn't inspire trust, in an industry that already has a shaky reputation (even if you don't like to admit it, it's true, sorry, most people don't like us and sometimes they're not wrong).
We expect customers to hit random landing pages of companies they've never heard of, and fork over thousands of dollars. This requires high levels of trust, and the response as a whole is rightfully eroding whatever bit of trust or integrity there is in this space.
We've seen how much money Epik can continue to collect even when they've stopped providing services. What's to stop any other registrar from taking the same path? What's to stop any credible registrar from being sold, the new owners decide to drain it and stop renewing, stop paying out for sales, etc. We can be pretty certain that they'd get away with it for at least a few months. What's to stop any of that? Before recently, I'd have said ICAAN.
Seeing the breakdown at the highest levels of domaining means trust is more important than ever, since the actual systems and institutions in place seem to be dragging their feet.
If a registrar larger than Epik was running into trouble, they could probably get away with millions before anything happened to put a stop to it. Maybe Epik has gotten away with millions by now. We know about a couple of big sales that Epik didn't pay out for, but imagine how many smaller ones there are, too. People reach out to support, support tells them to wait and that it's all good, and the victims keep piling up.
You don't really have the luxury of being neutral when you're on a sinking ship. "Guys, calm down, stay in your cabins, it's just an iceberg. The iceberg has some good points, let's hear it out. Ignore the water at your ankles, it's nothing, it's fake news, you aren't up to your waist in water now, just wait here a bit longer as I grab the last lifeboat... Trust me, I'm an investor in this ship, it's going to be okay. In fact, we created our own boat rating services, and we have a 5 star safety rating! Here, just use this snorkel, you're going to be okay, don't listen to the haters, it's a coordinated attack on us."
We've got ICAAN-accredited Epik still accepting payments, GoDaddy buying up any viable competitor/useful service and knee-capping them to stunt any innovation, we've got the top domaining forum endorsing verifiable scammers/former sponsors, what a mess.
As domainers, we pay entirely too much rent to to middlemen for doing next to nothing, or actively holding back innovation as part of their business model. SPaaS, stunting progress as a service.
