Digital Life

It’s easy to forget that the BBC has one of the most used websites in the world.

In fact, the BBC’S is the UK’S sixth most popular (measured by visitor numbers), beaten only by the American sites Google, Facebook, Youtube and Amazon.

A website that measures these things, similarweb.com, says the BBC has almost 600 million visitors each month, which is a lot. What’s more, that excludes connections made via the iplayer or the Sounds app, which you can install on your phone. The BBC is undoubtedly fully committed to the internet.

This comes at a price; just providing enough computing power to cope with this popularity is quite a tall order, even before the expenditure of generating the content. I searched the BBC annual report in vain for the cost; the figure may be buried somewhere in the 286 pages, but I couldn’t find it. My guess is that it’s at least £350m pa; probably much more. This compares with the £116m we are told that Radio 4 costs.

The BBC has the privilege of guaranteed income from our licence fees; this means that the website doesn’t have to earn its keep, as most websites do. However, all privileges come with obligations. The BBC regards one of these obligations as making its news services available worldwide without much regard to cost; as a trusted source of news, it sees this as a global mission.

But not everyone approves, and some countries either block the BBC website or monitor who looks at it – or both. China, Iran and Vietnam have been specifically named by the BBC.

It has therefore taken the fairly bold step of launching its international news service on the sinister-sounding ‘dark web’, which will make it more readily available to those who are denied access in the usual way.

This dark web is not as ominous as it sounds; its content is simply the huge amount of the internet that cannot be looked at through your usual browser without decryption, and often not even then. It does not show up in search engines. At a benign level, this includes the confidential bits of your online banking site, but it could be anything.

What the BBC has done is to launch a copy of the BBC News website on the Tor network. Tor (which stands for The Onion Router, the name of the original software project) was created by the US Navy to allow users to mask their identity and location. You need a special browser, but it’s free. It is much employed by the military and by government offices who wish to keep their online activity secret.

Of course, this anonymity is also attractive to those with evil intent: drug dealers and worse use the network. The FBI recently closed a paedophile site that had been hidden on Tor. They have been unwilling to explain how they cracked the network secrecy; security experts suspect that they didn’t (and couldn’t) – but had an informer, in the old-fashioned way.

I salute the BBC’S initiative; not something I say often. It reminds me of the World Service short-wave transmissions that were once used to reach the rest of the world, especially countries that banned the BBC. The World Service is still broadcast on short wave to various parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

I have no doubt that, in the medium term, growth in communication is going to be on the internet. And there are few secrets online. Unless you use technology like Tor, it’s all recorded and can be tracked somehow by someone.

Every so often, the BBC does something that takes you by surprise, and reminds you that some of the people there are still working to some of the Reithian principles. The ‘inform and educate’ ones, anyway.