Ebusiness Despatches: BBC - the Business Busting Corporation

The BBC enjoys a unique position - so it shouldn't abuse it and harm smaller start-ups across all kinds of sectors, argues columnist Rene Carayol...

The BBC is an organisation struggling to understand what it should be. The corporation has a public service broadcasting remit - has done since pre-World War Two days when it dropped the 'company' moniker and vowed to inform, entertain and educate - but it seems to be adhering to it less and less.

This is a problem. Maybe it's not such a big problem for the BBC, which has embraced commercialism successfully in recent years, but it is for dozens if not hundreds of competitors in various fields.

BBC? Does that stand for Business Busting Corporation?

To hear criticism about the BBC using licence fee funds to crowbar into commercial markets is nothing new. But it is really taking things too far when it tries to muscle in on just about every market going.

Let's re-cap. In my days at IPC Magazines we - and commercial competitors such as EMAP - knew all too well that the BBC could cross-promote its publications on TV and radio.

Then there is the tremendous success of BBCi, its online activities - millions of impressions and superb content but with nary a care for commercial pressures.

Add to this its dalliance in the eighties with home computing - the BBC Micro actually lost the corporation, and therefore the tax-payer, money (see http://www.silicon.com/a50798 ) - and e-learning, an area where it will spend £150m over the next three years just on the digital online curriculum, much to the chagrin of various smaller software and publishing companies (http://www.silicon.com/a51137 ).

My last column was about the need for broadband to succeed in the UK, and so for some kind of stability for broadband providers (http://www.silicon.com/a51282 ). And so the latest BBC beach-head turns out to be - you guessed it - broadband.

The company should not be allowed to hold back on the sidelines and then, when there is carnage on the competitive field, come in and throw its weight around. Smaller providers - those for so long left with wafer-thin margins when dealing with BT Wholesale - are crying "Foul!"

Don't get me wrong, the BBC does content and does it well. That's what we pay them for - not pipes.

Let it be a supplier to broadband companies, the ISPs or even cable companies, but not a competitor.

If the BBC wants commercial arms, as it has stated with Beeb.com, for example, it should float them or sell them. They can't operate without shareholders and without declared P&L figures - in other words without the same pressures hundreds of innovative UK companies have to put up with in these tough times.