The European Commission is planning a frontal assault on public service broadcasters throughout Europe, including the BBC, and threatening them with a residual role as niche players in the digital multimedia era, German sources warned last night.
Just as the BBC is negotiating its charter renewal, the commission is said to be ready to interfere directly with broadcasters' charters drawn up by national governments by placing new and severe restrictions on their right to offer online services.
The EU's competition authorities, headed by the Dutch commissioner, Neelie Kroes, are set to cave in to pressure exerted by commercial channels and enact a new policy favouring the latter's competitive edge in digital, multimedia offerings, it is feared.
The warnings come ahead of Thursday's expected decision by the commission's competition directorate to set out its "provisional legal opinion" on allegedly unlawful state aid to the two German public service broadcasters, ARD and ZDF.
The decision, which follows complaints from commercial broadcasters, will give Berlin at least four weeks to respond and could lead to formal infringement proceedings being taken against the government of the chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, for violations of state aid laws.
It is understood that both ARD and ZDF, which are ultimately controlled by Germany's 16 federal states, are in close contact with senior BBC executives and other EU public broadcasters about the implications of the case, including for the licence fee and spin-off commercial activities on the internet.
The German sources warned that it could prompt a legal showdown between Germany's constitutional court - which guarantees both ARD and ZDF the right to extensive web-based services - and the European Court of Justice and/or the commission.
Ms Kroes is understood to have concluded that the licence fee - some €17 (£11) a month in Germany, slightly more than the BBC's - does not constitute unlawful state aid. But, it is said, she has serious misgivings about its use to fund internet services, seeing it as an illegal cross-subsidy.
Public service broadcasters fear that Ms Kroes has been unduly influenced by last year's paper issued by the Association of Commercial Television, the European Publishers Council and the Association of European Radio, which labelled the recent audience growth among their public rivals as the result of "unfair" competition sponsored by governments.
They have seized on recent commission decisions regarding the BBC's "digital curriculum" (online Open University services), Denmark's TV2 and the Netherland's NOS as reversing previous rulings which uphold public broadcasters' charter rights to offer broad-based "technologically neutral" services, including digital, interactive programmes.
German broadcasting sources regard these interventions as directly contrary to previous EU decisions upholding the BBC's right to go ahead with News 24 and nine digital TV and radio channels or ARD's special interest channels, Phoenix and Kinderkanal.
In an effort to head off a confrontation, ARD and ZDF are to limit their online services, to programme-related content. Their subsidiaries are separate units for accounting purposes, with no cross-subsidies from the licence fee, and only 0.75% of the channels' overall budget is spent on them.
