Rebecca MacKinnon has been pressing Skype on its partnership with TOM.com in China. As you may well know, Skype has a TOM branded version of Skype in the PRC that filters keywords in the instant messaging portion of the application. Rebecca has asked Skype to at least disclose how much/little is being censored. The latest comment by Jaanus Kase of Skype is disconcerting:

Skype has taken a decision to have TOM Online actively manage its business in China, thus you should be addressing these questions to TOM.

It continues to astonish me what American companies are willing to let local partners do in their name (such as with Yahoo and Alibaba). Now I’m certainly not for the US Congress to step in and in the name of “human rights” punish companies that conform to Chinese censorship rules. The last thing we want is for political posturing to be mixed up with this issue.

But one would think a company like Skype would care about brand reputation, customer perception and bifurcating a product (ie. are you using Skype or TOM/Skype?). In addition, not even providing a unified front for public relations between their US and China operations makes me wonder if companies like Skype and Yahoo really know what they’re doing in this space.