Rob Monster
Robert W. Monster is an American technology executive and the founder and chief executive officer of Epik, a domain registrar and web host known for providing services to websites with far-right content.
He has received media attention in relation to Epik, particularly surrounding the company's decision to register the far-right social media network Gab, about which he has been outspoken. He has also received attention for controversial statements, including some in which he has promoted various conspiracy theories and some which have been described by HuffPost and the Southern Poverty Law Center as espousing antisemitic or white nationalist sentiments.
Life and education
Monster was born in to a Dutch American family, and he grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He earned his bachelor's degree and MBA at Cornell University. In 2007, Monster became a devout Christian. He is married to Jill Monster, a family physician. They have five children.Career
Marketing (1991–2007)
Monster began working for Procter & Gamble in 1991, and spent years working in Japan and Germany in this role. In his last year, he was the global product development manager for Pampers, a brand of baby diapers. After eight years at the company, he left in 1999 to move to Seattle, Washington and found Global Market Insite, an online market research company. He served as the CEO for seven years, until he was ousted by the board in 2007.Technology (2009–)
He founded Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company, in 2009 in Sammamish, Washington. he continues to serve as the CEO of the company. In 2015, he became the interim CEO for DigitalTown, a company that provides community-building platforms. He resigned from this position in 2018 in what was described as a planned departure to allow him to focus on Epik.Monster has been an outspoken defender of Epik's choice to host far-right, neo-Nazi, and other extremist content that other web hosts have refused, saying that the company is committed to protecting "lawful free speech". He learned about Gab, a far-right social network, in 2018 when the company received media attention after it was discovered that the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting had used the service to post extremist content. After it was dropped by its registrar, GoDaddy, he met with Gab CEO Andrew Torba and agreed to register the website. The BBC reported Monster as saying that Gab's founder Andrew Torba was "doing something that looks useful", and that Gab's removal from the internet was "digital censorship". He subsequently became an active user and defender of the network. He has received media attention for publicly defending violent neo-Nazi Gab users, maligning people who criticize the site and call for stricter moderation, and making unevidenced claims that racist users are fake accounts created to hurt the site's reputation.
Monster has also defended the idea of hosting 8chan, a far-right imageboard known for its hateful content, connections to multiple mass shootings, and hosting of child pornography. Epik briefly hosted 8chan after Cloudflare terminated services for the site, after the perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso shooting allegedly used it to post his justification for the shooting. The following day Epik was banned from their primary hardware provider Voxility because of their services to 8chan, taking 8chan, The Daily Stormer, and other Epik customers offline. Monster wrote the day after the ban from Voxility that he had changed his decision to provide services to the imageboard site, although Ars Technica noted that the company had only stopped providing 8chan with content hosting services, and had taken on providing the site's DNS services.
Politics
Monster's political beliefs have been described by HuffPost as "at times... almost indistinguishable from those of the neo-Nazis he’s defended on Gab." In December 2018, he shared on Gab a video created by Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, in which she described migrants as bringing "rape epidemics, sharia law, and the spectacle of terror." In January 2019, Monster appeared as a guest on "The People's Square", a podcast hosted by pseudonymous white nationalist Eric Striker. He was criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center for appearing on the show and for comments he made about white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, including "He’s actually a pretty clever guy, he’s articulate. He knows history. And I don't know the body of his work, but have a feeling that many people grew up with this mindset that you shouldn't listen to anything David Duke says." Monster later told the SPLC in an interview that he did not know who Striker was when he agreed to speak with him, and that he "disagrees with Duke’s racist worldview but respects his intelligence".Monster has been accused of antisemitism because of some of his writings on Gab, where he has said "Are there a lot of 'Jewish' people who are in a position of power or influence and favor other 'Jewish' people, Ashkenazi, or otherwise? Sure. Do I think God is impressed by that? No, I do not.... God will deal with them and in His time and His way regardless of hoaxes and conspiracies along the way." He has replied to a user who referred to him using the antisemitic slur "rat kike" to say he was "not a 'kike' nor governed by one. :-)", and reassured a person who expressed disapproval that two members of Epik's board were Jewish that "having a Jewish person on Epik’s board may be somewhat helping with keeping certain forces at bay." He has also suggested that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was a "false flag" attack. In a comment on an Epik blog post explaining why the registrar accepted Gab's business, he wrote "I have many Jewish friends, and have been called 'Mensch' many times".
He has promoted several other conspiracy theories, including that the death of an American missionary who had traveled to North Sentinel Island was a "psyop" intended to discourage Christians from doing missionary work.
Monster was widely condemned in the wake of the Christchurch mosque shootings for uploading video of the shootings to Twitter and Gab. He posted on Gab that he had uploaded the file to the InterPlanetary File System, and wrote that Epik was working on a tool to make it simpler for people to create IPFS files, describing IPFS as "crazy clever technology" that makes files "effectively uncensorable". He also shared the link to the video on Twitter after Twitter announced it would be removing any video of the incident. His tweet was removed by Twitter after several hours.