A person familiar with the matter said Google removed content from its search service, YouTube video site and Blogger after receiving an order to do so from Judge Mukesh Kumar of a New Delhi district court.

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The company said last week in a blog post that it is now able to censor tweets by country, igniting something of a firestorm over how it will use that power.

“There’s been no change in our stance or attitude or policy with respect to content on Twitter,” Costolo said, speaking Monday evening at the D: Dive into Media Conference.

What is different, Costolo said, is that now it will only have to block tweets in the country issuing an order, rather than for all users around the world.

“When we receive one of those, we want to leave the content up for as many people as possible while adhering to the local law,” Costolo said.

He added that the policy isn’t really about China or Iran, countries where Twitter is already blocked entirely. Nor does he expect this new capability to allow the company entree into China.

“I don’t think the current environment in China is one in which we could operate,” Costolo said.

Costolo also rejected the idea that Twitter could just ignore certain countries’ laws and still do business there.

“It is simply not the case you can operate in these countries and choose which of the laws we want (to adhere to),” Costolo said.

The announcement, published on the official blog of the microblog operator, said Twitter is now able to withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available to the rest of the world.

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Poor Chris Dodd — he just got the top media lobbying job in Washington, D.C., at the very moment that the strong-arming-pols, scare-the-children, Jack Valenti era in media lobbying is now decidedly over.

It’s obviously a very confusing time for big media these days, on a lot of fronts. But any of the consummate insider moves once used by the legendarily pugnacious Valenti (pictured here onstage at our first D: All Things Digital conference in 2003) had a hard time this past week, as Internet players went very public in protesting two Congressional bills aimed at combating piracy online.

Not that Dodd didn’t try to cope.

The former Senator — who is now the chief lobbyist for the once much more powerful Motion Picture Association of America — gave a can’t-we-all-get-along interview to the New York Times on Thursday, in which he called for a meeting with techies to come to some acceptable compromise.

Wrote the Times:

“In an interview Thursday, Mr. Dodd said he would welcome a summit meeting between Internet companies and content companies, perhaps convened by the White House, that could lead to a compromise … ‘The perfect place to do it is a block away from here,’ said Mr. Dodd, who pointed from his office on I Street toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

But on Friday, after politicians quickly moved to delay both the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA) — after successful protests pointing out that the legislation could lead to censorship — Dodd went to the full Valenti again:

“We applaud those leaders in Washington who have chosen to stand with the millions of hard working Americans all across this nation whose livelihoods are threatened by foreign criminal websites designed to steal. As a consequence of failing to act, there will continue to be a safe haven for foreign thieves; American jobs will continue to be lost; and consumers will continue to be exposed to fraudulent and dangerous products peddled by foreign criminals.”

Foreign criminals! Foreign thieves! Is it just me, or does Dodd sounds like Cher, singing, “Gypsies, tramps and thieves”?

(Let’s be clear, that utterance could never top Valenti’s most infamous quote: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone.”)

To be fair, Dodd is hindered by strict restrictions on his lobbying Congress until next year. That said, this is not an old-timey, private Capitol Hill fight, but a modern-era, social-media-charged one.

And it’s pretty clear that the old scare tactics used by big media will no longer work as well, as consumers — as much as they like their movies — seem to love their Internet more.

Thus, what has happened is that — at least for now — the MPAA and media companies have lost and lost big, after the typically fractious Web powers decided to lock arms for once and cooperate with a creative, take-it-to-the-people approach of showing a disabled Internet.

Dramatic? Yes. Effective? Certainly. (That Facebook and Google agree on anything? Astonishing!)

Where it goes from here is unclear — the MPAA and its constituents could certainly rally and put forth their own protest. Ironically, the most effective way to do that is not via the airwaves or other former means of broadcast to the public, but on the Web.

Which is controlled by Dodd’s foes. (You see the problem here.)

The answer, in the end, might have to be the cooperation he first suggested.

As he told the Times:

“The companies, Mr. Dodd said, are ‘rethinking everything,’ not just about the bills, but about their relationship with an estranged Silicon Valley. That need for rapprochement, he said, ‘has come home in a way that no rhetoric of mine could express.’”

Much more to come, obvi.

Unless there’s a really big shift in sentiment among members of Congress on both sides of the ideological aisle, some version of the Stop Online Piracy Act is going to be passed by Congress sometime in 2012.

That means the legislation is going to wind up on President Barack Obama’s desk, requiring his signature, which would make it law; or his veto, which would effectively kill it. That makes it pretty much the first significant bit of technology policy he will face in the new year.

What’s not entirely clear is which way Obama is likely to decide. So far, the administration hasn’t sent any signals, one way or the other, on either SOPA or its companion bill in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

But there are some key clues.

SOPA and PIPA are proposed laws that would, among other things, give media companies significant new tools to police pirated online content that appears on Web sites hosted outside of U.S. borders. It would also require U.S. companies that link or do business with them in the normal course of operations — sites such as Google, Yahoo and eBay’s PayPal — to cease doing so.

For instance, Google might be forced by the courts or U.S. law enforcement agencies to stop providing search links to BitTorrent sites that host pirated copies of major motion pictures and television shows. It could go even further than that, by stopping U.S.-based Internet-service companies from allowing users to access any overseas site carrying pirated content.

Critics of the legislation charge that the two bills have gone overboard to protect content. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has said it would “criminalize intermediaries.” Other companies, including Yahoo and Facebook, have claimed it could stifle innovation.

The problem the White House will face is that both bills appear to have a broad base of support in Congress. And proponents, such as the House Judiciary Chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, are pushing the bill as a means of protecting American jobs by ensuring that profits from U.S.-produced intellectual property flows to the companies that created it.

But there are a few tea leaves indicating where the president might come down on this issue. For one thing, the administration has been pretty clear from the beginning that it supports an open Internet; not vetoing the bill now would be a major policy shift.

And, during 2011, the power of the Internet as a force for social change has been demonstrated throughout the Middle East: Dictatorships in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are gone, and others are under threat by movements that have been largely organized and coordinated on Facebook and Twitter.

Just last month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at a conference on Internet freedom in The Hague, made an interesting comment that perhaps captures the nuance of the Obama administration’s position.

As the Hill noted, while sympathetic to the problem countries and companies face in combating the theft of intellectual property, Clinton said that governments can do so “without compromising the global network, its dynamism or our principles.”

The SOPA bill, in particular, would also criminalize contributing to or distributing technology that is meant to circumvent actions that block access to such content. That would put the government at odds with a project it has funded, the Onion Router (a.k.a. TOR), created by U.S. Naval Researchers and a nonprofit organization.

Under SOPA, the problem might be that people in more repressive countries, like China, can use TOR to anonymize traffic and thus bypass technical measures that prevent the free flow of information. The language in the bill is vague enough that TOR could be made illegal.

Then there’s also Obama’s promise to support a free and open Internet generally, which has been a major bedrock of his technology and Internet policy agenda. Early last month, Obama promised to veto a Congressional resolution that would overturn net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission put in place earlier this year, and which was to take effect on Nov. 20. (The Senate saved him the trouble by voting against the resolution.)

Therefore, Obama’s stance on the issue perhaps hints at an aversion to any significant changes in the status quo of the Internet, which suggests he would likely veto any version of SOPA or PIPA that reaches his desk.

A congressional “tech mandate” on search engines to delete a domain name from search results does not result in the website disappearing. Users can and do today find their way to these websites largely without the help of search engines. Relative to the questionable efficacy of this proposed remedy, requiring search engines to delete a domain name begins a worldwide arms race of unprecedented “censorship” of the Web.

– From a letter written by Vint Cerf to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the House Judiciary chairman and author of SOPA, warning of the dangers of the bill

Separately, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called on corporations to do “human-rights due diligence” before making sales in new markets.

“In recent months we’ve seen cases where companies’ products and services were used as tools of oppression,” Mrs. Clinton told a conference on Internet freedom in the Netherlands.

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The sponsor, Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.), said the proposed legislation is in response to reports that some governments have used American products to crack down on dissidents.

“How will all these dictatorships ever matriculate into democracy if the dissenters … are all in prison, hunted down with high-tech capabilities sold or acquired through U.S.-listed companies?” Mr. Smith said.

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Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., says it shipped the Internet “filtering” devices to Dubai late last year, believing they were destined for a department of the Iraqi government. However, the devices — which can block Web sites or record when people visit them — made their way to Syria, a country subject to strict U.S. trade embargoes.

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Our only comment is that if the government would like to talk about this we’d be happy to listen.

Twitter PR exec Rachel Bremer, responding to U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron’s trial balloon to limit access to Twitter, Facebook and communication technologies like BlackBerry Messenger in the aftermath of his country’s riots.

In January, the 33-year-old online activist and software developer was jailed after the government accused him, among other things, of attacking President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s website. Mr. Ben Ali soon fell from power. Mr. Amamou was swept into the interim government, embodying how the youth who had run a revolution from the Internet had now gained a toehold in power.

Now he is back on the outside, worrying about what he sees as a new threat of Web censorship.

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The unnamed official was quoted Thursday in a report from China’s state-run Xinhua news agency that clarified the role of the new agency amid China’s already crowded Internet regulatory landscape, saying the new State Internet Information Office will coordinate and streamline oversight and enforcement and will be run by officials from agencies already involved with Internet regulation.

The official said “untenable” remarks made by critics are intended to “tarnish the image of China,” according to Xinhua, adding that China’s policies are meant to safeguard information security and the development of the Chinese Internet amid an industry boom. “A small group of people have made irresponsible remarks about China’s Internet regulations, disregarding basic fact,” the official said.

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Google declined to comment specifically on whether an application had been submitted. But given Beijing’s claim and the timeline here–not to mention Google’s recent spat with the Chinese government over Gmail and its souring relations with the country–this looks like more “New Approach to China” posturing.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google Shutters Google.cn
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• Report: Google Bailing on China in Early April
• Beijing to Google’s China Partners: Nice Site You Got There. Shame if Something Happened to It.
• China: We Are in Talks With Google. Also, We Are Not in Talks With Google.
• Chinese Scientists Recalibrate Google’s Evil Scale
• Chinese Schools Tied to Attacks on Google? Where’d You Read That, Mad Magazine?
• World War WAN: Google Hack Traced to Schools in China
• Nearly a Month After Debut, Google’s “New” Approach to China Still a Lot Like the Old One
• Google CEO: Ask Not What Google Can Do for China–Ask What China Can Do for Google
• China on “Google Farce”: Our Internet Is Open
• China to Google: No Worries, We Were Planning to Clone Those Android Phones Anyway
• U.S. State Department to Complain to China About Google Hack. Not That China’s Going to Listen.
• Microsoft: “Don’t Be Evil” Is Google’s Motto, Not Ours
• What’s the Chinese Word for Bing? Google Threatens to Leave China.

McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., has sold hardware and technology in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that has been used in conjunction with McAfee’s Web-filtering software and sometimes to block websites on its own, according to interviews with people working at or with ISPs in the region.

A regulator in Bahrain, which uses McAfee’s SmartFilter product, says the government is planning to switch soon to technology from U.S.-based Palo Alto Networks Inc. It promises to give Bahrain more blocking options and make it harder for people to circumvent censoring.

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Yesterday, the Obama administration dribbled out the news that it was going to nominate current Commerce Secretary Gary Locke as the next ambassador to China.

If approved, Locke will surely have his hands full on a wide range of issues, many of them impacting the tech sector, including piracy, privacy and government-sponsored censorship.

Perhaps more interestingly, the move leaves open a post–which the Obama administration actually had a hard time filling initially–that could get a true turbocharge if it were filled by an exec from the fast-growing digital arena.

It’s not a bad idea, since tech is probably now the most critical business arena in the U.S. and one of the only markets in which this country innovates and excels at.

While the Commerce Department has a huge and disparate domain, from international trade to the census to promoting American businesses, its digital footprint has been much less profound than the industry’s increasing importance to the U.S. economy.

After all, despite some interesting international efforts, most of the current crop of tech stars are U.S. born and bred and leading the way in digital innovation.

In fact, every big trend right now in value creation are all coming out of tech.

Gaming? Zynga.

Social networking? Facebook and Twitter.

Retail? Groupon.

Mobile? Google and Apple.

So, why not pick a business person from the area to lead the government agency dedicated to business?

But that’s where it gets dicey.

One more obvious candidate would be outgoing Google CEO–and Obama favorite–Eric Schmidt.

I would assume he might welcome such a prominent post, although putting him in place at Commerce would be a tough road.

Issue one and only: The investigations of Google’s aggressive business practices by federal regulators make this an awkward decision for Obama, given Schmidt would be open to a lot of scrutiny going through confirmation.

But there is a long list of others who could be considered to serve, especially if you think well outside the box.

What about former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, who certainly has the management cred?

Or mega-VC John Doerr, who–despite his recent social fever–might finally get to push his beloved clean-tech agenda onto a larger stage?

What about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who recently showed she could deliver a boffo speech and who might lend some Silicon Valley magic to her former Washington, D.C. rep?

And while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ laugh would have a hard time getting Congressional approval, why not consider someone who has profoundly changed the way an entire business sector does business?

In that vein, Reed Hastings of Netflix also fits the bill.

Except these three execs are pretty busy these days. So, what about former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, whose failed bid to be California’s governor as the Republican candidate leaves her without a post.

President Barack Obama had picked a GOP pol as his second choice for Commerce head, in fact, so Whitman or even Cisco CEO John Chambers are not out of the question.

The point is to perhaps move outside the Beltway’s comfort zone and pick a Commerce Secretary who represents the future rather than the past.

The following is an edited version of the interview.

WSJ: What is the future of the Internet?

Mr. Cerf: There are several trends which will carry the Internet over the next several years. First is mobile–mobile technology and the access to the Internet via mobile devices is becoming extremely important. We’re also seeing Internet infrastructure reach more deeply into places where there isn’t any–in places like Africa. Another trend is submarine cables and satellite capability while another trend is the ability to bring video and audio to entertainment devices in cars or homes using the Internet.

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Should free and open communication—particularly free and open communication via the Internet—be considered an unalienable right? How much control should a government or Internet service provider wield over its citizens’ communications?

This is very much a global issue and, while it’s easy to say that every citizen should have “uncensored access” to the Internet, such a statement is too glib, and here’s why.

If we have learned anything in Internet security from the past 10 years, it’s that a completely open Internet can make it as difficult to communicate safely and effectively as a closed one. The past decade witnessed a meteoric rise of unwanted traffic in the form of spam and cybercrime, made possible through cheap and easy Internet connections. Should spammers engaged in mass-marketing (as well as other more nefarious activities) be able to communicate as freely and easily as Egyptian protestors? Where do we draw that line?

Second, while censorship is prominent in countries like Egypt and China, Americans face more subtle—but equally serious—concerns about the quality of our network access, with issues ranging from network neutrality to competition in access networks. Our government’s decisions affect our Internet access quality and speed. Six years ago the Supreme Court decided Internet service providers (ISPs) were under no obligation to lease their infrastructure to competing carriers. This has effectively created a near-monopoly for Internet access in many regions of the United States and left users either unable to exchange certain types of traffic (such as when Comcast blocked BitTorrent) or with flagging Internet speeds (such as when AT&T delayed its rollout of fiber to the home as part of its U-Verse offering).

Finally, even if citizens can access the Internet, they must also be able to verify information sources. It’s not just whether Facebook, Twitter or YouTube is blocked—it’s whether governments or other organizations are using such sites to spread propaganda.

All of these issues, both at home and abroad, revolve around one question: Who should be the Internet gatekeeper, and what rules should be applied at the gate? I believe the foundations of rights in the digital world rest on two pillars: transparency and choice. First, the actions of ISPs and governments should be transparent; if they take certain actions to restrict, throttle or otherwise manipulate communications or information, users must know about it. Second, users must be able to choose their ISP. If they do not like the performance or policies of a particular ISP, they should have the ability to switch providers.

Transparency is thornier than it appears. Because ISPs do not publicize the way they prioritize different kinds of traffic, we must reverse-engineer these practices with measurement tools. Even notions such as “Internet speed” are complicated and can’t be represented by a single number. Also, different users may be concerned with different performance metrics; gamers might be interested in network service that delivers traffic with the least amount of delay, while those who stream movies may care more about receiving a high quality signal with few errors.

At Georgia Tech we are working with the FCC to give consumers a better sense of whether they’re getting what they are paying for, in terms of ISP performance, and also to educate them on how they might coax better performance out of their home networks.

But in the end, transparency is only helpful if users can choose among Internet service providers. Unfortunately in the United States, users have very little choice. We must reconsider ways to make the ISP market more competitive, perhaps drawing on our own experiences in forcing competition among utility providers.

Though the events in Egypt seem far away, the central questions about information access are quite relevant here at home. Demanding that the ISP policies and behaviors be transparent—and providing users more choice in the ISPs they can use—helps ensure that everyone’s Internet is less vulnerable to the whims of a single gatekeeper.

Nick Feamster is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on many aspects of computer networking and networked systems, including the design, measurement, and analysis of network routing protocols, network operations and security, and anonymous communication systems. In 2010 he was recognized by Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35 for his research in computer networks, and he also received a Rising Star Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Feamster is featured in the March 2011 issue of Discover magazine in a multi-page exploration of tomorrow’s Internet.

Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain’s Guardian, Spain’s El Pais, France’s Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, “ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored,” according to a screen shot reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The notice warns that anyone who accesses unauthorized sites from military computers could be punished.

The Air Force said it had blocked more than 25 websites that contained the documents, originally obtained by the website WikiLeaks and published starting late last month, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems.

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The four videos, which have kept YouTube banned here since May 2008, were taken off the Web late last week by a Turkish group of self-described “volunteers,” working closely with the government. The group used Google’s automatic copyright protection system to have the clips removed.

Turks were able to access YouTube directly for the first time in more than two years last weekend, after a court on Saturday lifted the ban, noting that the offending clips were now gone. Google, however, said Monday it was restoring the videos, while critics described the volunteers’ copyright plan as an enabler for censorship.

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Craigslist first put up a black box reading “censored” on its site last Friday, following a period of increased pressure from a group of attorneys general and anti-prostitution groups. Craigslist hasn’t explained the move, or said whether it plans to permanently shut down adult services listings, which critics say had become an online red light district.

Now the “censored” label, which suggested that Craigslist executives saw adult services as a First Amendment issue, is gone. Craiglist didn’t explain the move.

We may get more of a clue of their view next Wednesday, when the House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on domestic minor sex trafficking. Craigslist executives last week told the Journal that they had been invited to speak at the event.

A spokeswoman for the committee said that the witness list hadn’t yet been confirmed. Craigslist’s spokeswoman declined to comment.

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“If this were happening with physical trade, we’d all be saying this violates trade agreements,” Drummond said. “If you want to be part of the community of free trade, you have to let the Internet be open.”

So what’s to be done? Drummond says the U.S. government needs to respond to foreign nations who censor the Internet in the same way it would to those that restrict free trade. “We have great opportunities now with pending trade agreements to start putting some pressure on countries to recognize that internet freedom not only is a core value–that we should be holding them to account from a human rights standpoint,” he said. “But also that if you want to be part of the community of free trade, you are going to have to find a way to allow the internet to be open.”

A wonderful idea in theory, but one that’s certainly not going to go over well in places like China, where an “open Internet” is by defininition a restricted one.

Last Friday, former Google China head Kai-Fu Lee (pictured here) dialed up BoomTown from that country for a chit-chat interview about his life since leaving the search giant one year ago and plunging into the world of incubation, recruiting and early-stage funding for start-ups there.

Being president of Google’s China operations is far different from being CEO of Innovation Works, which just celebrated its first anniversary.

And, although he left Google (GOOG) on tense terms, said many sources, Lee complimented it as still having the best technology in the world.

Nonetheless, he also added it will only become harder for any U.S. company to compete in China over the next few years for a variety of reasons.

Lee would not specifically talk about Google’s fight with China over censorship issues, but said the bigger problem for it and other U.S. Web companies was actually that they are not local or nimble enough to beat out an increasingly trained Chinese tech workforce.

According to Lee–as well as explained in an interesting deck he sent me that is embedded below–Silicon Valley can no longer rely on a tech edge that it has long had, and China units of U.S. tech companies still will not empower their Chinese employees enough to compete.

“In China, there are a mass of very talented engineers who can attack a long-tail opportunity very quickly,” he said. “This kind of speed is critical in this market now.”

That’s why–unlike most Silicon Valley venture firms with a presence in China–he decided to focus Innovation Works on early-stage companies.

“We see it as a unique opportunity to provide a refreshing accessibility for small, but promising, Chinese companies,” Lee said. “There are a lot of inefficiencies.”

With a heavy focus on mobile–which Lee considers the key arena in China, much of it based on versions of Google’s Android mobile operating system–Innovation Works has focused on a dozen start-ups, including:

Tapas: An Internet smartphone operating system–based on Google’s Android–tailored to Chinese users.

Wonderpod (Wandoujia): A software “assistant” for Android phones to download applications, videos and music without consuming expensive mobile bandwidth.

Umeng: An analytics tool for mobile developers in China.

Photo Wonder: Mobile phone software for enhancing and sharing photos.

Ascending Cloud: A game publisher built on proprietary technology for developing and publishing social and Web games for over 30 countries.

Lee said now that the strategy and investments are in place, next year’s focus will be on nurturing the companies Innovation Works has invested in.

While he said he knows that it is still early, Lee–who has also worked at Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT)–said he thinks that China, specifically Beijing and Zhongguancun, could become the next Silicon Valley.

“There are 300 million Chinese using mobile devices and there is no one or two dominant player, as is the case in the U.S.,” Lee said. “It’s the same across a variety of areas, so the landscape for small, scrappy start-ups is wide open and huge.”

We’ll see how it all turns out. but here is the must-see deck from Lee, as well as a press release on Innovation Works’ first anniversary and a detailed description of it:

Innovation Works Overview (US Press)

Sep 8 Press Release

Incubation Programs