Yesterday a well wisher determined that hate group Kiwi Farms was being hosted by service provider Codero.com. Action was swiftly taken to draw this to the company’s attention as Codero has very clear policies against hate speech and disclosure of personal information. Today Kiwi Farms reported an outage (archive here). It is unclear if this relates to host loss but verification is in progress and if necessary further action will be taken. Supporters are now able to reliably identify Kiwi Farms’ hosts on a regular basis. As Kiwi Farms breaks the terms of nearly every known hosting company, it is likely to be quickly moved on.

The incident does give an opportunity to explain a new tactic. In the past, when Kiwi Farms has been banned by hosts it has often been able to obtain refunds even when the owner has clearly committed a repudiatory breach of contract. A new approach for the anti-Kiwi campaign is to ask terminating hosts to withhold funds where they are legally entitled to do so.

For example, if a hosting company has a policy against publishing phone numbers and has to spend engineer time investigating allegations that a site has published phone numbers before terminating the account then they should withhold relevant funds.

Not all hosts will comply, but many will and the mere existence of this strategy should have a profound effect on Kiwi Farms funds. It means that Joshua Conner Moon cannot pay for significant periods of hosting in advance without risking the whole amount being lost. As pre-purchase often attracts significant discounts, this will increase the monthly costs of running Kiwi Farms even before litigation and other expenses.