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