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The BBC website the Brits can't access

The Brits are fuming - and the BBC is the target of their anger.

Apparently, the BBC has set up a new section of their website called BBC Future which looks like an interesting collection of content.

The problem is that only countries *outside* the UK can access these pages.

What the?

The rationale behind this decision is that the content on this new site isn't paid for by the national broadcast license fee that funds the rest of the organisation's work.

The official explanation goes like this...

According to a BBC spokesperson:

"It [the Future website] has been created for the BBC's commercial website bbc.com for audiences outside the UK. Under the BBC's Fair Trading rules commercial websites are not allowed to receive unfair promotion from the BBC's public services. This prevents us from being able to provide Future content on BBC.co.uk."

Now I can understand that a website which might be created using money pulled from the license fee might be restricted to UK-only visitors -- but prohibiting their domestic audience from accessing a global site that is funded from ad-revenues elsewhere in the corporate structure?

Someone's been having too much sugar in their cocoa me thinks.

Personally, I hate these silly attempts to create artificial divides in the fabric of cyberspace.

The Internet is a geography-free environment where such divides become totally ridiculous and their circumvention is trivial -- so why even bother?

We've seen the enormous harm that the movie and TV production industries have done to themselves by attempting to maintain the staggered country-based release of their products -- let's not have any of this silliness on the web.

If things continue the way they seem to be heading, one of the biggest growth industries in the next few years will be subscription proxy servers.

Perhaps future botnets will be focused, not on sending spam, but creating invisible (to the victims) networks of proxies that can be hired to people who want to sidestep stupid geography-based road-blocks on the Net.

Of course such networks would also attract pirates, hackers and fraudsters -- all of who want a simple way to cover their online footprints.

One thing is for sure -- what we *don't* need, is another reason for these illicit proxy networks to be created.

Get with the programme BBC -- the internet is a homogeneous space. the only divisions are purely artificial and they will not work.

It may be time to create some "networks of friends" who offer to set up reciprocal proxy services in different parts of the world. So long as you deal with people you know and trust, this will soon sidestep any of these stupid road-blocks.

What do readers use to get around these stupid restrictions?

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