During this past week I’ve had an experience with a domain name that can only be described as a nightmare. I found myself with a domain stuck in a “no mans land” between two registrars, the registry and a bunch of crazy policies. So what happened?

The domain name in question was simcast.com and one that I have personally owned for nearly two decades. We’ve been building some really awesome tech at ParkLogic and decided to use this domain as the flagship lander for a lot of traffic. Since it was in my personal name, I decided to transfer it from my personal registrar account at Epik to the ParkLogic Enom account.

I should say that the ParkLogic Enom account only existed due to legacy reasons and I was just trying to tidy things up. During the testing process we discovered that the domain was no longer resolving for a growing number of nameservers…..one of which was Google’s public DNS. This wasn't a really good situation because if the domain went live we could be losing a lot of a traffic....plus one for testing!

I must admit that I’d never seen behaviour like what we were seeing before and assumed initially that it was due to some weird DNS propagation delays. I waited 24 hours and assumed the Internet would sort itself out. Things didn’t improve, in fact, they only got worse.

I contacted the Enom support desk and listened to really bad 80’s music for about 30 minutes while on hold. Seriously Enom, you really need to get some better music! The support person told me that despite what I could prove that everything was fine…..essentially they were clueless.

I’ve been reading a thread on NamePros that got pretty heated when Jackson Elsegood from Escrow.com, Matt Barrie (Freelancer CEO – Escrow.com’s parent company) and Rob Monster from Epik became involved. I don’t normally like to get involved in these types of squabbles, but I thought for this one I’d make an exception.

I would like to first state a disclaimer, I use Epik as a registrar and have been very positive in posts about the services they provide. I also use Escrow.com and Escrow.com has been a long-time sponsor of Whizzbangsblog. Now for this blog post….

There is a BIG difference between saying you provide escrow services and being approved by a governmental authority to provide Escrow services. Why is this? The governmental body has the authority and mandate to audit a fully licensed escrow service to ensure they are not only behaving in a correct manner but have the resources to backup any problems. There are incredibly large penalties for companies that don’t abide by the rules.

Anyone can put a shingle out and claim to provide an escrow service….I could be wrong but I would think that it’s only a matter of time before the governmental authorities stop them from doing this. If the authorities don’t stop it then it makes a bit of a mockery of governmental oversight.

That being said, my understanding is that Escrow.com does have governmental approval while Epik is not approved by any governmental authority. Regardless of whether it makes sense for the government to be involved or not these seem to be the facts.

When Matt Barrie (Freelancer CEO) challenged Rob Monster (Epik) on the state of the cash in Epik’s balance sheet it was a very relevant question. The only thing that can back-up a failed Escrow transaction is cash….not lots of other assets as claimed by Rob. For a start, the other assets take time to sell and may not be enough to back up a failed transaction.