UserFriendly - 2:17 pm on Jul 4, 2010 (gmt 0)

It's ridiculous to say that the BBC should be cut down because it harms business. Regardless of how the BBC is funded, if it's doing a good job then it should be valued by the nation. To shut some or all of it down and divert the money to private companies (who will take a much bigger chunk of that money as profit and therefore offer less in return) is folly.

As for micropayments, I still can't see that mechanism being popular with payment processing companies. I think the minimum charge per page would have to be more than one or two pennies, otherwise the processing companies will complain that there's no room for them to make a profit. Plus, the problem will remain: news really isn't that valuable from the mouth of a single journalist, so you'll always be able to hear the same sort of thing from someone else for free. Even blogging harms Murdoch's old empire of protected publishing, and that's not going to go away.