Digital Britain-a round up

I was out most of yesterday so missed the assault on the blogosphere about the Carter report on digital Britain.

Looking at the headlines this morning it seems that the main issue is over the levy on phone lines to pay for broadband.Yes you would expect it on the front of the Express but not also as the main headline for the Times.

I sincerely hope that this is not the main message that is remembered from yesterday but I fear that it will be.Let's just put in into context,£6 a year,that's about 12p a week.

There are some good reflections in the papers this morning.In the Telegraph Neil Midgley thinks that Lord Carter has missed an opportunity

The unpalatable prospect is that, as the featherbedded BBC continues to steamroller its private-sector competitors, those shiny new fibre-optic cables might end up with precious little commercially produced British content to carry.

Midgley goes onto say that despite moves in the right direction

Lord Carter's report will leave ITV locked in regulatory squabbles, when it should be focusing on making great programmes. The result could be that ITV ends up bankrupt

and with Channel 4

A truly visionary step would be to remove Channel 4 from the advertising market, and give it a big slice of the licence fee instead. That would have made a real difference in balancing the public and private sectors, and forced the BBC to rethink its apparently infinite ambitions.

The FT believes It is time to chop up Auntie.

Lord Carter’s proposal cuts to the heart of the problem: the BBC cannot be allowed to become a monopoly provider of public content and this liberalisation, if extended, would allow plurality of provision without the current reliance on vulnerable cross-subsidies.

The Times says the report

shows an extraordinary willingness to extend government intervention into almost every nook of Britain’s broadcasting and communications industry.

adding that the meddling as it puts it

not only discounts the power of creativity and innovation in the market, it destroys it.

more sketch than blueprint says the Guardian

At 238 pages and 22 "action points", innocent readers may have been reminded of Pascal's rueful admission that with a bit more time he would have written a shorter letter; because this was a publication long on consultation and in many places frustratingly short on conclusion.

and adds that

It deals with structure and delivery of content, rather than the content itself. It worries about provision of local news, but (with the exception of a potentially interesting proposal on a role for new local news consortiums) decides that the main answer lies with regional TV news

For the Independent

For most of us, it is the micro-geography of the digital revolution that has most impact on our lives. The television set is less and less the focal point of most modern homes. In many cases, it is now a flat screen connected to a bewildering array of boxes, consoles and computers, while other flat screens in other parts of the room, or in other rooms, are also used for watching television or YouTube or for switching between reading and watching clips of news on the internet.