It's not just Maradona, either: According to Time magazine, similar restrictions applying to both Google and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) are in place for more than 100 public figures in Argentina.
Argentina, of course, is just one of the countries that has taken a dim view of the global information Web created by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), and other companies. China is notorious for blocking information the government doesn't want those outside the country to see or know about, and the Web is no exception -- which is why searches from within China for information about Tiananmen Square turn up travel articles instead of sites about the government's military crackdown on peaceful protesters in 1989.
Google has also removed links to racist material in the German and French versions of its index at the request of the German government and has removed links to certain Websites critical of the Church of Scientology as a result of lawsuits from that organization over copyrighted internal church documents being distributed.
Search engines aren't the only part of the Internet that has been crippled by such lawsuits launched by individuals concerned about negative publicity. Wikipedia, the "open source" encyclopedia that has become one of the most popular information resources on the Web, isn't available at the German domain name it has used for years -- wikipedia.de -- because of a lawsuit by a left-wing German politician, Lutz Heilmann, who didn't like some of the information that appeared in the entry about him. Unfortunately for Herr Heilmann, searchers can find it at the U.S. version of the site with little trouble.
To most sane people, such efforts are like King Canute, who tried to stop the ocean from rolling up onto the beach in front of him. Just as he was destined to fail, so too are the German politician and the Argentinian soccer player and anyone else who thinks they can somehow stop the flow of information.
China and other countries with totalitarian regimes have come the closest to controlling Internet information, simply because they control the pipelines that Chinese citizens use to access the Internet, and because they know Google and Yahoo and Microsoft want access to their market. But even there, information makes its way out eventually.
As more than one geek pointed out even before the World Wide Web came along, the Internet sees censorship as damage and ultimately finds a way around it, as its original developers intended. Some governments, companies, and individuals have yet to appreciate the reality of this, but that doesn't make it any less true.
Mathew Ingram, technology writer for The Globe and Mail in Canada
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?doc_id=168195&f_src=ieupdate
