How Maradona censored Yahoo! and Google

Diego Maradona, ­ diminutive football star, manager of Argentina's national team and a man with a gift for spawning acres of news print wherever he goes ­ has suddenly turned publicity-shy. Following a leading lawyer's intervention on his behalf, Yahoo! Argentina has effectively removed him from its search results.

Maradona is not the only high-profile citizen to have been disappeared from Yahoo! Argentina. He joins a glamorous list of around 100 Argentinian celebrities locked in a bizarre and unprecedented legal battle with both Yahoo! and Google. Critics accuse the Argentinian courts of censorship, and claim that, without an EU or US-style law that holds publishers responsible for their content, a 'legal vacuum' will leave the Argentinian internet effectively unworkable.

This battle threatens the business of search, the lifeblood of the internet

Maradona is represented by Martin Leguizamon Pena, a Buenos Aires-based lawyer with a reputation for fighting to keep people off the web. His client list includes models, actors, even judges. His technique is simple: he inundates the search companies with claims for damages, and has persuaded the Argentinian courts to issue notices restricting search engines from showing defamatory or scandalous pages relating to his clients.

Google - comparing the logic to suing a newsstand for the contents of its newspapers - publicly refused to filter search results pending an appeal to the Argentinian courts. The search giant does, however, appear to have responded to some specific cease-and-desist notices relating to Pena's clients, removing individual pages from its Argentinian search site and informing users where search results are missing.

Yahoo!’s blanket take-down won’t just affect one Diego Maradona

Following its own unsuccessful appeal, Yahoo! Argentina - with neither the resources nor the inclination to examine the nature of each individual search result (a search for 'Diego Maradona' on Yahoo! UK throws up 3.5m sites) ­ has responded to the court order by removing almost every reference to the footballer, leaving a handful of favoured newspaper articles and a notice informing users that 'for legal reasons, we're obliged to temporarily remove results related to this search'.

Although the court orders are temporary, pending a final ruling, the message is worrying. Holding a search engine legally responsible for the content of its results makes the very business of search, the lifeblood of the internet, impossible. And, on a purely practical level, Yahoo!'s giant take-down won't affect only one Diego Maradona, but every other Diego Maradona, too.

Argentina looks set to lose its claim to a free and unbiased internet

Perhaps more importantly, there's a specific concern regarding some of Pena's non-celebrity clients, such as high-profile judge Maria Servini de Cubria, a public official now involved in the business of filtering what the Argentinian public can and can't read about her. If state intervention into the web is allowed to become the norm, Argentina must lose its claim to a free and unbiased internet.

While Argentinian Yahoo! users who want to read about their football hero are said to be circumnavigating the ban by using other Spanish language versions of the site, activists from the OpenNet Initiative, ­ a global organisation monitoring web censorship and filtering, ­ are watching the skirmish closely.

Although content filtering is currently on the rise, this is the first case, anywhere, of filtering based on search rather than on results. The fear is that ­ should court interference with internet search be tolerated ­ neither free speech nor the very business of search could survive. ·