DIEGO MARADONA has disappeared. In a bizarre twist to the global battle over freedom of speech on the internet, Argentina’s best-known football icon has become embroiled in a baffling legal wrangle over his rights to control the stories that appear about him online.

Maradona is one of at least 70 Argentine celebrities who have launched what amounts to a class-action suit against the local versions of Google and Yahoo!, the internet search-engine giants.

Backed by a prominent Argentine judge with her own reasons for suppressing internet chatter, Maradona has pulled off a unique vanishing act. Any Argentinian who enters his name in a local Yahoo! search receives only a legal disclaimer: “Due to a court order . . . we find ourselves obliged temporarily to suspend all or some of the results related to this search.”

The Maradona case high-lights a dilemma that is beginning to confound human rights activists fighting to preserve free speech on the internet. The global dream of a worldwide exchange of free information is beginning to collapse under the weight of governments and individuals determined to limit or deny internet access for a range of sinister, contradictory and often farcical motives.

A spokesman for Google Argentina - which has not yet blocked Maradona searches pending a legal appeal - has denounced his lawsuit as “completely illogical” and “absurd”.

The footballer and numerous other celebrities are reportedly concerned that their names and images have been improperly associated with pornography sites. Others claim that the celebrities are simply trying to sanitise colourful or controversial pasts.

Many of Judge Maria Servini de Cubria’s legal rulings have stirred fierce internet debate - but she too has disappeared from Yahoo!; its compliance has been seen as a deliberate ploy to illustrate the pointlessness of blocking local searches.

The reality of the Maradona saga is that any Argentinian who really wants to be reminded about the past misdeeds of the newly appointed manager of the national team need only click on any other international search engine for several million stories about his well-documented exploits with wine, women and cocaine.

Yet despite the comparative ease with which censorship can be sidestepped, internet monitors last week reported a gloomy picture of increasing crackdowns on freedom of online expression.

A survey by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists found that in 2008, for the first time, more bloggers and online journalists were jailed than reporters for any other medium. Of the 125 journalists behind bars on December 1, 56 worked online.

Even countries seeking rapprochement with western democracies have been reluctant to abandon their suspicion of the internet. On the day last week that Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader, announced that his country was ready for a dialogue with Barack Obama, the incoming US president, Havana’s best-known blogger, Yoani Sanchez, was summoned to the interior ministry. She was ordered to cancel a meeting of bloggers she had hoped to hold yesterday.

Sanchez, whose Generacion Y blog has won several international awards for its revealing accounts of the realities of life in Havana, was told that she had “transgressed all the limits of tolerance” through her “contacts with counter-revolutionary elements”.

In Turkey last month Richard Howitt, a British Labour MEP, warned the justice minister, Mehmet Ali Sahin, that recent bans on YouTube and hundreds of other websites were likely to scupper attempts to join the European Union.

Even Australia has come under fire for its efforts to force internet providers to filter out illegal content. The proposals have provoked a furious debate about what should be counted as illegal pornography and how effectively access can be barred. When a previous government offered parents a free anti-porn filter, a 16-year-old hacker broke the code in 30 minutes.

Internet monitors are concerned that the pressure is intensifying on search engines and internet providers to comply with government restrictions or risk either huge fines or loss of business. Google, Yahoo! and other leading internet firms have launched their own anti-censorship initiatives and now report all disputes to chillingeffects.org, a watchdog website run by a Harvard University unit.

Yet Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, wondered in The New York Times last week whether Google’s commitment to freedom of expression would survive pressure for profit, particularly at a time of worldwide economic slowdown.

“Can we trust a corporation to be good,” Rosen asked, “even a corporation whose informal motto is ‘Don’t be evil’?”

Logged off

China
24 online journalists currently in jail.

Gambia
Critical blogger Ebrima Manneh has not been seen since his arrest in July 2006.

Turkey
Blocked access to the website of Richard Dawkins, the British atheist.

Malaysia
Blocked Malaysia Today, a popular news website, and arrested its founder, Raja Petra Kamaruddin.

South Korea
Requires real identities of local users of YouTube and other popular sites.

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