Legislation and a strong industry code of conduct are necessary to end the complicity of Western Internet companies in political censorship in China, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today... [The report] documents how extensive corporate and private sector cooperation – including by some of the world’s major Internet companies – enables this system of censorship... “Western Internet companies are complicit in actively censoring political material without telling users what’s happening and why,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a consultant to Human Rights Watch. “...It is time for Internet companies to decide whether they want to be part of the problem or part of the solution.”...The report vividly illustrates how various companies, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and Skype [part of eBay] block terms they believe the Chinese government will want them to censor... Tests showed that Chinese Internet users can access greater amounts of information using the censored www.google.cn and MSN Chinese search engines than they can using providers based in China. But the tests showed that Yahoo! China’s level and method of search censorship is as bad and in some cases worse than the heavily censored Baidu...