Auntie Beeb certainly gets around on the internet. There's not a subject that hasn't got her distinctive features all over it. News? No problem. Sports? Certainly. Education? Both O and A-levels, my dear, no extra charge.

And she upsets the neighbours, too. Every pound of the £100m that goes from the licence fee to BBC's new media is seen by other internet publishers as adding a little more wood to their smouldering funeral pyres.

But the BBC's 300 new media staff, and their massive efforts on the web and interactive TV, are not a new phenomenon driven by dotcom greed. They are the latest instalment in the BBC's 20-year-old effort to create a digital Britain.

Twenty years ago, the launch of the BBC's computer literacy project and, with it, the BBC Microcomputer, started the technological revolution in the UK. By the end of its product life, the BBC Micro had sold more than 1 million units. Every school had the option to buy one at a discount. Two generations of school children have been introduced to the wonders of the digital age, inspired directly or indirectly by the BBC's original efforts.

Now, with its websites and interactive television some of the most popular in the UK, the BBC is gearing up to do it again. The heads of the BBC's new media empire say the critics have got it wrong.

We meet across the road from the BBC's spiritual home, Bush House, in London. There, Ashley Highfield - director of the BBC's new media and technology section - is keen to highlight the links between what the BBC does now and what it was doing all those years ago.

"The parallels are interesting," he says. "The vision we've got in new media is to try to accelerate digital Britain, and that seems to have been much the driver 20 years ago behind BBC Micro; of trying to, one, create a much more technologically aware Britain, and two, make it really easy for people to get on, which is still our mantra."

The BBC is not, alas, about to launch a new BBC Micro for the 21st century. With the age of the internet, it is not needed.

"I think we are really all about interoperability," says Peter Bury, head of the BBC's research and development department. "Perhaps, back in the early 80s, there was no common platform. The industry has grown up and now understands that unless you have common standards, nobody actually makes any money."

Ah. Money. You remember all the stuff at the beginning? How other internet companies are a little upset with the BBC? How dare the BBC, the rivals demand, come over to the internet and start offering all this great content with no need to make money? Don't they realise there are private companies trying to earn some cash here?

They go on. The British Internet Publishers Association (the membership of which includes the publishers of the Guardian) complains: "The size of audience for the BBC's internet services adds considerably to the costs and risks of the establishment of new, competitive services. Furthermore, it provides the potential for the BBC rapidly and without constraint to develop extensive new revenue streams, again at the expense of actual and potential competitors."

Or to put it another way, if the BBC is going to give it away free, why would anyone pay us?

The answer, as far as the BBC is concerned, is not as sinister as the BIPA might think. Ignoring the question of whether anyone would pay to support commercial operations given the amount of free content worldwide, the BBC's new media team does not see itself as competing with anyone. In fact, they say its job is to help everyone out.

Highfield says: "We're trying to find out what people want, what they don't want, and then we will publish our findings. If we can work to create the content, share all of what works and what doesn't, and help set standards, then basically everyone in this industry is going to win."

So does the BBC see that as an extension of the public service remit: you're creating open standards for the benefit of the entire industry?

Highfield again: "Yes. We have to be the creative R&D for the industry. We had to be the innovative, venture capital for the UK media, and that is one of our most important roles. We're doing it to learn, find out what works, to share it."

You don't look at the figures and celebrate beating rival sites? You don't actively go out for higher ratings?

"No."

While the argument could be made that private companies should already know that the BBC exists, and see the difficulties involved in competing with it before they start, the BBC does make itself difficult to pin down. And their openness after the launch of a new service contrasts notably with their secrecy before.

For a public service corporation portraying itself as the creative R&D for the nation, it does a very good job of keeping its upcoming "research" secret. Indeed, their interview technique - blanking specific questions regarding future plans - is as good as any commercial company's. Nevertheless, rumours - albeit completely unconfirmed - do come out of Bush House.

For instance, there's the one about a complete change in copyright philosophy: where the idea is that the licence fee payer has already paid for, and in many respects owns, all the content produced by the BBC. Thinking this way, the BBC could then allow anyone who wants to use existing BBC content to do so. The onus then will rest on the commercial operations to take on board both BBC advice, and their content, and create something better. Such a radical plan, if the rumour is accurate, would place the BBC in a unique position.

That, of course, is just one idea, and given such a huge staff and a such a wide-ranging remit, Highfield's team is unlikely to stick in one area for long - a fact that further infuriates commercial rivals.

"What we're trying to do now is move across different genres," he says. "From a summer of sport we're moving into a fall of factual."

If you've ever seen a man wish he'd not coined a phrase, you can recall that image now. Nevertheless, Highfield is pleased with the plans for the next few months.

One project has the internet and interactive digital television departments acting as the primary outlet, with broadcast television dipping in. The BBC will be dropping a deep water sub to the bottom of the sea. It will take a day to get down, look around, and come back up. All the while, live coverage will be shown on the web and interactive channels. BBC 1 will dip in through the day, but new media is the main outlet.

Taking the web from a geeky diversion, to the long-trouser-wearing main channel for such a major broadcasting project, is both pleasing for the new media team, and a radical change in broadcasting philosophy.

In the beginning, says Highfield, everyone thought the internet was just like television, but with words. It's not the first time the incumbent media has got it wrong: Highfield is fond of a story from the early days of telephony, when newspapers tried to colonise the new medium by reading the news out to paying subscribers.

"The telephone rings and you pick it up and somebody speaks the news at you for 10 minutes," says Highfield. "You're not allowed to interrupt them because it's a live person there and, in the end, you go 'thank you very much' and hang up. Clearly this was barking mad."

He draws a parallel with today's early efforts at interactive television. "All we've done is, by and large, enhanced linear television," he says. "But in 10 years' time, we'll say, well yeah that was useful, but we so missed the fact that this is now a two-way medium, and therefore it will become a different device."

The concept of the two-way web is an important one for the BBC new media department. Tom Loosemore, its head of web communities, is looking at using the BBC's network of popular regional radio stations to bring audiences online.

One project to be launched next year is a radio and web local history project, aimed at the older generations. As Loosemore says: "There, at a stroke, if we get it right, we'll have created a mass increase in the reach of 55-plus on the internet, through community-based regional services."

The BBC's original ambition - to educate and join the country together as a nation - seems to figure strongly in the new media department's thinking. Highfield again: "I think so many people have always looked at the negative side to these technologies, such as the isolationist potential, whereas the sort of communities we've created, through the BBC, are totally liberated."

He tells one final story - of the Radio 1 website user who posted a message saying they were ready to commit suicide. The community of teenagers rallied round, and there was a happy ending. "How mature those 15-year-olds must have ended up as a result of that particular experience," he says.

And perhaps that's how it will be: while the Reithian BBC had Nations speaking unto Nations, the internet-age BBC is trying for something more personal. Not nations declaiming unto us from above, but people speaking with other people.

And while they may get together to chat about EastEnders today, who knows what they will talk about tomorrow?