Even in the super-charged internet world, the BBC's dot.com juggernaut is gathering impressive pace. It could end today with a lorry load of evidence that it is miles ahead of the competition.
In the 2000 European Online Journalism Awards, to be presented tonight at the NetMedia conference at City University, London, the BBC is shortlisted in 14 of the 19 categories. Auntie could win gongs in everything from design to investigative reporting, via business and economics and music and entertainment.
This comes only 10 days after the Henley Centre ranked the BBC top of the 10 most trusted websites in the UK. And it follows hard on the heels of Monday's unveiling of a revamped sports website, backed by funding of up to £6m and 45 staff. That is almost as many staff as work on the hugely successful News Online stablemate, which has recently upped its profile even further by doing a deal with Yahoo!, the UK's second most popular website, to have its content displayed on the site's news pages.
This appears to be a big success story: the BBC transferring its content on to the internet, building its brand online and gaining great respect around the world; 40% of BBC Online's traffic comes from overseas, although the UK traffic is still enough to rank it the 9th most popular site in the UK.
But from the rest of the UK's online publishing industry come howls of protest. Commercial publishers say the BBC is steamrolling into areas already well served by the private sector, and using licence-fee money to snatch traffic away - even making it difficult for private sites to secure that oxygen of online business, venture capital.
The British Internet Publishers' Alliance (Bipa), is leading criticism of the BBC's online drive. Bipa has submitted evidence to the Davies review of the future funding of the BBC, and the House of Commons' select committee on culture, media and sport last year, when it was considering the future of the BBC.
Its argument was summed up by Bipa chairman and Daily Telegraph director, Sir Frank Rogers, in a letter to the Times in April. "There is no case whatsoever," he wrote, "for the BBC to use public money to become a major electronic publisher on the internet."
The net, with its lower costs and already diverse content, did not need a public service organisation to drive wide take-up of internet services, said Rogers. He described the much touted notion of convergence, where TV, radio and internet content is delivered to consumers on a single device, as "a seductive and misleading prediction".
It is not hard to see why privately funded internet publishers are afraid of the BBC moving into their patch. While the start-ups struggle to raise finance and discover the so-far elusive revenue streams, the BBC has no such concerns. BBC Online's £32m budget last year came from the licence fee, and the site does not carry advertising or sponsorship.
This week provided one of the best examples of the unfairness of the BBC's position, its detractors say. When the corporation decided to launch its new sports website, £1.5m was found to set the new venture up, along with an annual budget of £4-£5m. With the sports website market already one of the most competitive in the UK net industry, it is unlikely a start-up would have been able to convince venture capitalists to part with that kind of money.
Stephen Nuttall, head of sport at Sportal.co.uk, wryly points out that BBC Sport Online's spending money this year is more than his company's entire first round of funding. "And that was to put up an international network of sports sites, not just the UK," he adds.
Sportal scored a coup with its exclusive internet rights to Euro2000, and was named the best private internet company in Europe last weekend. But, says Nuttall, the BBC's renewed interest in online sport takes the gloss off his company's successes. The BBC has a big budget and, just importantly, it can cross-promote the online service on radio and television, he says.
The BBC's determination to carve a niche in online sports will not make it an easy neighbour, he says. "The world does not need another sports site. If someone was trying to raise venture capital for a sports start-up, I think that their business plan would be scrutinised very carefully indeed. Who is going to scrutinise the BBC's?"
According to Bipa, that scrutiny is badly needed to stop the BBC smothering newborn dot.coms with its own launches. Angela Mills, its secretary, says the BBC's public service role needs to be redefined.
"Nobody in Bipa is saying that the BBC has no place on the internet. We're not saying it should be kicked off," she says. "It is just a question of making sure there are clear parameters between what is publicly funded and what falls within the private sector, and that proper rules apply in both."
But is BIPA's case not built on vested interests and more than a hint of sour grapes? Even new media commentators based in the US are expected to say at NetMedia today that the BBC supplies a news service which matches, even outstrips, the best of what is on offer from the States.
Mills, however, appears to take a softer line than her organisation's chairman. Online News is, she admits, "one of the world leaders, and it should be there."
"That is exactly the kind of thing they should be doing, even although there are head to head commercial operations, including ITN which is a member of Bipa."
The problem arises where, she says, the BBC launches into areas where there is already fierce competition - like sport and, last year, into internet service provision with Freebeeb.net last year.
That move sparked a flurry of protest both from rival ISPs and content providers, who feared the BBC's broadcasting channels could persuade large numbers of people to sign up for freebeeb.net then remain within the BBC's internet offering when they got online.
Their fears were certainly not allayed by freebeeb.net's launch, given a little glitz by two of the stars of BBC Television's Top Gear programme. This, they said, was a perfect example of the BBC's brands and stars, built up by publicly funded channels, being used for commercial gain.
In the end freebeeb.net - run by BBC Worldwide, the commercial part of the BBC not funded by the licence fee - has not proved the massive force in the UK ISP market that many feared, and cross-promotion has been limited.
But, says Bipa, it is a good example of how the BBC's commercial and publicly funded online activities have to be monitored and carefully kept apart. Mills is reluctant to say what the BBC's role should be in the online world. "I don't think it's up to me to decide what the BBC's role should be, but there should be a debate," she says.
"They should not be a national champion in the way that they seem to have been putting themselves forward, and in some ways as the government has supported them. There is no other European country which has a champion in this way.
"You hear them [the BBC] saying 'We're increasing internet usage' and I think that's rubbish - I think what will get people online is lower telco costs, cheaper PCs, better security and consumer confidence. The fact that the BBC is online is not going to get hordes of people using the internet. That is really misguided.
"The public service remit would have to be something of quality and worthy of the public funding, not interfering with the private sector too much."
The BBC's response has been to point to the quality of its offering and the corporation's "core values" of information, education and entertainment.
Nigel Chapman is the BBC's director of online, the non-commercial arm which includes news and that controversial sport site, but not BBC Worldwide's beeb.com and freebeeb.net. He says the BBC will not be put off from its aim to expand rapidly in the online world, with its continuing ambitions in this arena to be confirmed by the appointment of a new all-powerful director of new media within a few weeks.
"Online as a medium is here to stay, and is expanding very fast," he says. "We know that in some groups - in particular young people - their consumption of traditional media falls as online usage expands. So you need to be in online to continue using all the weapons in your armoury and build relations with licence-fee payers in the United Kingdom."
The theme of keeping up with licence-fee payers' migration to the webrecurs in Chapman's defence of the corporation's publicly funded activities online, and is one of the main reasons he insists: "there is a special role for the BBC on the web".
"Our new sports online site is a classic example of something that is strategically valuable to the BBC," he says. "We need to reinforce the value of BBC sports to users, and it's extremely valuable because we have an awful lot of high-quality sports content - both audio, video and text and pictures - and a high standard of journalism. It's a situation where both the BBC and the licence-fee payers win. It's a perfect example of an area we should be in."
But, as Sportal and the BBC's other sporting rivals ask, does the world need another sports site? Not surprisingly, he says yes, it does. "I understand their fears, and I'm not surprised they see the BBC as a major competitor - it is a major competitor. But just because Sportal.com and everybody else is going into sport online doesn't mean the BBC should not be in it."
Chapman says that much of the new site's content already exists, and it is the corporation's duty to make it available to licence-fee payers.
"I think it is really important that the BBC makes the most of its investment in sport. We have this material in the BBC already - it would be a pretty sad situation if we weren't allowed to use the internet as another platform for people to access it."
Chapman also defends the news content deal between the BBC and Yahoo!, which prompted one commercial content distributor to say this week he had his head in his hands, asking "why?" The arrangement, he said, meant the biggest content site was in bed with the biggest portal: a formidable partnership that he felt any for-profit distributor would struggle to break through.
Chapman says that is not so. "The deal with Yahoo! is not an exclusive one. We are in discussions with other portals about something similar both for News Online and for other parts of BBC Online. It is not our ambition to give Yahoo! some marketplace advantage over other portals. Our ambition is to use our relationship with portals so that people who do not come direct to bbc.co.uk can see our material well presented in portals."
He also gives short shrift to some more outspoken members of the UK's internet community who suggest that the BBC is, in fact, not as good at internet content as it - and others - think. "All the indicators - both qualitative and quantitative - all the awards, all the traffic, the independent assessors - all of them say what a brilliant job the BBC has done in Online, and how pivotal it has been in creating a benchmark of quality," he says.
"We're not complacent - there's a lot more to do, and many areas we should be in that we are not. The issue of web television is to come.
"But in the narrow-band world in which most people live we have put a stake in the ground about quality, range and depth of content which, frankly, is not matched by anyone else in the UK market."
