- Register.com is an annoying cesspool of value-add upsells and is extremely expensive in the process, with added cost to not have your personal info attached directly to your domain whois.
- GoDaddy, other than the creepy ads, has shown plenty of willingness to remove domains hosting content that they don't like, even if it's legal.
- I think Google is a registrar, but I'm not at all comfortable with how easy it might be to move my domain out of their grasp if I care to host my content somewhere else. I'm sure it's possible, I'm sure it has weird issues, and I'm certain there's zero support to talk to.
- Epik has, at least as far as I can tell, a reputation for simply hosting domain registrations, not asking questions, and ignoring just about every request for information.
Of those options, I'm fine with the last. I tend pretty hard towards the "free speech" side of the spectrum, and a registrar that will ignore anything short of a legitimate legal request from the authorities of the nation(s) they operate in is perfectly fine with me. Even if they host domains I consider distasteful, I'd rather support that than someone who will bow to public outrage and go snooping around domains looking for reasons to remove their registration (GoDaddy and Arfcom come to mind here).
There are probably other options, but those are the ones I know of, and why I'm intending to register future domains with Epik. I don't particularly care if a founder of a service is a scumbag in their personal life, as long as they reliably do what they promise to do.
Also...
> When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. Whenever you want to, you can transfer the ownership to yourself or some other party.
No?
The ownership is a hack to workaround for some legal issues (e.g. for .es domains you're not allowed WHOIS privacy). Although post-GDPR most whois servers dramatically restricted public access, so maybe it's less important now.