Kivvi.kz

» see kivvi.kz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kazakhstan opened its own video site on 2 February 2009. It was called kiwi.kz, it was run by a company called Video Online, and the reason it worked is that Kazakhtelecom, the national telephone operator, hosted it on their own network and made all traffic to it free and unmetered for subscribers of Megaline, their broadband product. The commercial director's line at the launch was that building local content would bring down the cost of internet access in the country. In the first week the site logged over 5,000 unique users on one counter and around 4,000 on another, against a national broadband base that had just passed 660,000 connections.

It had four parts: video uploads, communities, a broadcast section where you could go live off an ordinary webcam, and streams of Kazakh television and radio. The interface ran in Kazakh and in Russian, with an English build as well. Later there were apps for both phone platforms. Within a few years it was inside the twenty most visited sites in the country, which in a market that size is what a national YouTube looks like.

The zero-rating is the part I recognize from a distance. Turkish ADSL in the same decade came with monthly quota packages, and when your connection is metered the question of which sites are free of charge quietly decides what you watch. Kazakhstan ran that experiment deliberately and at national scale, and for about five years it worked.

~ the case file ~

~ the mirror ~

In the spring of 2011 somebody uploaded a religious video to kiwi.kz. On 18 June 2012 that clip was entered into Russia's Federal List of Extremist Materials. A city court in Pyatigorsk ruled on 10 July 2013 that the site carrying it should be blocked, and in April 2014 Russian providers cut off the whole platform over the one file.

The operators pointed out that nobody from the court had ever contacted them, even though their contact details were published on the site, and that manually reviewing every upload was not possible, particularly clips whose only audio was in Arabic. The charges were dismissed that October. By then they had already registered kivvi.kz, with two v's, as a mirror so that people outside the country could still reach the service. The mirror stuck. Within a couple of years the spare domain was the brand, the logo said Kivvi, and the meta description on the front page was the only place still saying Kiwi.kz.

~ the arithmetic ~

In June 2015 the Kazakh internet industry went public with a set of numbers while arguing against a proposed anti-piracy law. Kiwi.kz and the other large Kazakh sites drew roughly 400,000 users a day between them. Kazakh users visiting Russian sites came to about 3 million a day. The argument made against the bill was direct: clean up our own platforms and the audience simply moves to Russia, where nothing is enforced at all.

That is the whole story of the site in one comparison. A national video host in a country of eighteen million, sharing a language and a border with a market eight times its size that had already built the platforms. The free traffic from Kazakhtelecom bought it years it would not otherwise have had, and it did not buy enough of them.

~ the domain afterwards ~

There was never an announcement. In January 2017 users were asking each other on forums whether the site was closing, because nothing new had been posted for a long time and the operators had said nothing. The front page had thinned out from around 22KB to 14KB in February and stayed that way. The last capture of a working kivvi.kz is from 5 April 2017.

After that the domain kept moving. By January 2020 it was redirecting to foxwatch.kz, a Kazakh news magazine with no video hosting in it. Today kivvi.kz redirects again, this time to an engineering firm with no connection to any of this, and kiwi.kz does not resolve at all.

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