invisible spanish web?

The term "invisible web" is often used to refer to a large part of the web that often isn't indexed by search engines and contains personal home pages, databases or password protected areas.

The term might as easily be applied to at least 300 commercial web sites in Spain who are letting their screens go blank in response to a new law which requires registration with the government, the display of certain information on the sites, and considerable government control of the content of the sites. This law sounds interesting:

The statute goes even further. It says that if Spanish authorities deem something on a foreign-hosted Web site threatening to Spain's national defense, public order, consumer rights or other values, they can order Spanish operators to sever access to that site.

The law took effect on October 12th. Hopefully the protest will cause the Spanish government to reconsider how they are approaching their regulation of the web.

[October 25, 2002 -- Some other sites are writing about Spain's Law of Information Society Services and Electronic Commerce (LSSI):

• Kriptópolis (Spanish) has a link to a babelfish translation of the law into English and links to a number of stories on the law in both Spanish and English. Many of the English stories make up the rest of this list


• Software Developer Radsoft writes about Trouble in Madrid.


• Gartner Group adds that this Controversial Spanish Internet Law Holds Lessons for Europe.


• The Online Journalism Review (OJR) notes that Spain Takes Inquisition Online
.

• The Register informs us that Web sites blackout over Spanish monitoring law, and they link to the next site on this list,


• Stop 1984 shows a list of sites that are offline, or are protesting the LSSI.

Radsoft suggests in their article that more of these sites should add English language versions of their protests to try to generate more attention to their plight from the internet community. The OJR agrees that a grass roots movement might help. Anyone interested in spreading the word? ]

[October 31, 2002 -- The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has added a considerable amount of information on this topic at their site on two pages. The first is The new Spanish "Law of Information Society Services and Electronic Commerce" (LSSI), and the second is on their International Data Retention page. Also, Kriptópolis (Spanish) has linked to our comment here (thanks), and to a number of other pages that are providing further information on this situation.]