Oooo that’s an idea, I’d also pay so much for subscriber-only RSS feeds like Nebula, if they were undelayed, had all the shows and didn’t have adverts for BBC sounds every 30 mins.

Hopefully Lisa Nandy is reading this thread 🤣

Middle ground in the sense of paying monthly, or paying less for a limited subsection of the content?

I ask because I pay by monthly direct debit. When I was a student, I also paid while I was using it and then cancelled it when I was not, and got a refund for the time I didn’t use it.

I feel quite similar. I love the idea of the BBC and I have fond memories of listening to comedy shows with my dad in the car as a kid. I think they do good investigative journalism, although I wish they were less timid. I consume the panel shows, podcasts, the news website. I really want to support it and help it succeed.

But, they really frustrate me when they try to lock things down. If podcasts go sounds-only, I’ll stop listening, because I don’t want two different ways of consuming podcasts, and supporting open standards is more important to me than supporting the BBC.

I understand that they lock things down to prevent people free-riding, but I wish the government would stick a progressive ring-fenced tax on, and then they could release everything openly to everyone. Every step away from that feels like a dilution of its role as a public service.

Ah right, I was talking about domestically, where it’s still available to everyone including those who don’t pay. But I think paywalling internationally is wrong too.

I’m worried that “extended to services outside of TV” means the end of BBC podcasts outside of BBC Sounds. They’re already limited, for instance with a week’s delay in some cases, but I’d be really sad if I lost all of them. I’m not really sure what else they could extend it to, unless they also make news paywalled, which would go against the whole point of the organisation.

I am upset seeing the BBC get salami-sliced into oblivion. I really hope the government commits to increasing funding of the BBC as part of the royal charter review, as its funding has been cut so much in real terms over the last 20 years. I want the government to be stepping in now with stop-gap funding to stem the flow in the meantime.

Like so much with the UK and austerity, I fear that we won’t know what we had until it’s gone.

I had to look at wikipedia to understand it. I think it’s do do with this right:

A patient not seen in the 18-week period without just cause has the legal right to go private at the NHS’s expense.

From the article:

“Minimum waits” after referral by a GP mean people in the areas affected cannot seek an assessment by a private sector provider. That is even though private clinics now undertake half of NHS-funded assessments of ADHD and a third of those for autism, because many patients exercise their legal right to choose non-NHS care, given the NHS’s own limited capacity to do the assessments.

Such curbs by the NHS are likely to force those who can afford it to pay a private provider for an assessment for themselves or their child, which can cost several thousand pounds. They are being implemented at a time when there are 960,000 people in England waiting for an ADHD assessment and another 295,000 awaiting one for autism.

So basically, it means that you can’t exercise your legal right to get treatment from a private provider, paid for by the NHS, if the NHS can’t see you within 18 weeks. Instead, that pushes people who want to get evaluated within 2 years, to pay for private assessment themselves.

I don’t drive, but rarely feel restricted by this. I’m able to get anywhere important to me, just with walking, cycling, buses and trains. I live in London, I know it’s not the same everywhere, but I’m happy that I don’t have to drive.

Leahy informed them their flight processing system did not have a dedicated backup due to Nats being in the midst of a “complete overhaul of its systems” and because the amount of data it keeps meant duplicating it would cost “vast amounts”.

Rolfe ruled out a cyber-attack, which was initially suspected, saying he “believes we’ve never seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation”.

Oh my goodness, that’s terrifying! How is it that bad? They sound like they’re just winging it and hoping for the best, and this is an air traffic control system!

I’m actually ok with this, if it only applies to the biggest social media companies (10million+ UK users) who have algorithmically ranked content. And it should apply to what gets weighted in the feeds, not whether the content exists on the site at all.

I think big tech companies shouldn’t be held responsible for all user generated content on their site, but they should be held responsible for the content they actively promote via the feeds, if they do so algorithmically. I think this article (from a US perspective) presents a good framework for moderation. The more you are a “dumb pipe”, the less moderation you should have, and the more you actively make user-facing decisions about content, the more oversight and moderation you should have. And, if you are a small provider (like the fediverse 😜) then you should be exempt from these regulations to encourage competition.

We have public service broadcasters who are regulated by Ofcom. It’s not perfect - Ofcom should be strengthened, made more politically independent and should have much more teeth, and they’ve been woeful in dealing with GBeebies - but the regulated public service broadcasters are among the most trusted news providers in the UK.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that any kind of restriction is a slippery slope. And I know the public service broadcasters are not perfect, there are problems of political interference that need to be dealt with, and of course they don’t appeal to everyone. But they are also among the most trusted news outlets?

I’m also sympathetic to the idea that the government is solving this the wrong way round. That they are trying to fix this on the supply side when really it’s a demand problem - people just don’t like the regulated news providers enough so they don’t get promoted by the feeds on social media. But that argument presumes that the tech companies’ feeds are purely responding to consumer demand; social media companies are now mostly owned by people who want to, or are careless about, interfering with our democracy and promoting particular ideologies. So I think the era of trusting that whatever the algorithms promote is just based on what we want is over.