Here’s a novel one. It brings together an up-to-the-minute wheeze apparently being widely played out on the internet these days and an age-old problem in parts of drought-stricken Spain. An unlikely combination you might think – I did too.

At the heart of this story is someone who has acquired the domain names that naturally and quite logically spell out the internet addresses of several Spanish government ministries. The Spanish government quite obviously wants to use these same domain names, or addresses, for its own departments of state. But the owner is refusing to “sell” or transfer the rights to use the names unless the government agrees to divert water supplies to all of Spain’s drought-affected regions.

This is a novel twist to the practice of so-called “cybersquatting”. It’s a contemporary tactic developed – of course – in the United States, where enterprising individuals work out what sort of internet addresses, or domain names, look as though they are going to be useful to major companies, organisations or government departments, and then buying the registration of those same addresses in their own name. The domain name is the bit that follows the “www.” in an internet address. If you are British Airways, for example, then you’d be prepared to pay someone who had registered “www.ba.com” quite a lot of money to claim it as your own (in this case, however, British Airways already owns the domain name). It only costs a matter of pounds to register any unused web-address for a couple of years, but its value to the corporations involved can, of course, run into five or even six figures.

Law suits in the United States have been keeping a small army of attorneys even richer as major companies have tried to argue that the actions of cybersquatters, who are sitting on desirable (to the companies concerned) domain names, are tantamount to infringement of the companies’ copyrights. Defence teams, meanwhile, argue that their clients are simply following the heaven-sent entrepreneurial right of every true American to spot a market opportunity and cash in on it.

A case currently preparing for the American courts, for example, involves someone who has registered scores of domain names derived mostly from the names of investment banks – examples are “goldmansachsdirect.com” and jpmorganonline.com”. The individual is now hawking the names to the frustrated banks concerned – at up to $70,000 a go; not at all a bad return on the $70 it cost to register it in the first place.

Be that as it may, I was particularly impressed by the novel angle on the cybersquatting ruse as it has surfaced in Spain, where payment is being attempted to be extracted in nothing as mercenary as money, but in water for parched lands.

In this case, the enterprising web-hound (so far unnamed, but apparently living in Alicante) seized upon Prime Minister Zapatero’s creation of four new ministries shortly after his re-election in March. He acted a lot more quickly than the fledgling ministries themselves had the foresight to do and promptly registered the web addresses derived from the names of the new ministries.

Naturally enough, the four ministries now want these domain names, since they would follow the same style and format as all other government ministries in Spain. But the man in Alicante has said he will only do so if the Prime Minister pledges to put in place a national scheme for transferring water from the River Ebro, running from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, to all the parts of Spain that suffer water shortages.

The demands follow a decision by the government in April to divert water from the Ebro only to drought-affected Barcelona. This had several other regions up in arms, since they reckoned it displayed favouritism towards Catalonia. A National Water Plan that was unveiled to the nation in September 2000, but attracted such a hostile reception – especially from the region of Aragon through which the Ebro flows and is jealously guarded – that it was effectively scrapped just four years later when Prime Minister Zapatero first came to power. The thorny question of water distribution across a country that has extremes of access has at times set the background to what have been forecast to become “water wars”.

The man at the centre of the domain-name protest has written a blog on the website that is the current home for the newly created Ministry of Equality, in which he writes: “Four years ago we had a great National Hydrological plan which would bring water to all the autonomous regions, the construction of which would have been financed entirely through EU funding. Zapatero cancelled that plan and now has agreed a project exclusively for Catalonia. Now all Spaniards must pay the bill to guarantee the Catalans have water”.

The protestor promises to return the domain name to the Ministry of Equality only once the government has corrected the “inequalities” in Spanish water supplies.

A spokesman for the four new ministries that are the focus of the protest has said only that action is being taken to retrieve the domain names. There has so far been no indication whether the government will in any way review its national water distribution plans or what alternative bargain it might seek to strike with the protestor from Alicante.