Presumably anyone against the News Corp buyout, because they're worried about it being anti-competitive or harming media plurality, is in favour of doing something about the BBC's privileged position?
This isn't a point made in favour of Murdoch; I'm hoping that his power over UK elections will decline, that the Times paywall will fail miserably, etc, etc. I just hope people might start to think more about the BBC's unsavoury aspects.
The licence fee is crude, anachronistic and unjust. It's a tax, no two ways about it. If I want to watch live TV, there is no way for me to avoid paying money to the BBC, and this is backed up by the implied threat of violence. I can't shop around or make a protest by denying an organisation my custom. I pay the same no matter how much or how little I consume, rendering it 'regressive'. I'm not sure how it will evolve to react to streaming TV over the Internet, but it will surely get more ugly and unjust unless it's abolished.
AFAIK, if you don't watch live TV, or don't watch content streamed over the Internet at the same time as it is being broadcast, then you don't need a TV licence. If this is the case, then you'll probably get a threatening stream of letters from 'TV Licensing', which fail to clearly explain when you need a TV licence and what their powers exactly are. Interestingly, this is all handled by Capita, and the BBC refused to disclose the details of this arrangement in an FoI request, in case Capita's competitors found it useful - presumably to outbid Capita and provide the BBC with a cheaper service.
If you jump through their hoop and tell them that you don't need a TV licence, they say they might want to send one of their salespeople around to search your home to check you're not lying. If the salesperson (who is paid on commission for TV licences sold and successful prosecutions) has a
snoop around your house, and is satisfied he can't catch you out, then TV Licensing will stop harassing you for some period of time, and then the letters will start again.
If you don't comply with their salesperson's desire to search your home, they can apply to a court for a search warrant. It's not clear what might convince a magistrate that there are reasonable grounds to believe an offence is being committed on the premises. Simply refusing a voluntary search might be a good enough reason. I can't find any information about this, and I suspect it varies from court to court and magistrate to magistrate. They must think it helps to send courts their glossy annual newsletters, which has got to be quite an unusual thing for a plaintiff to do.
If a warrant is served, it's not unusual for police to be present, who are only officially there to keep the peace. However, as we have seen many times with bailiffs, rather than uphold the law, police often make unlawful demands, such as for the name of the occupier, or other information TV Licensing don't need.
While they maintain that people who don't buy TV Licences are guilty until proven innocent, it's worth remembering that about 25% of those people investigated require them. While this percentage would go up without their draconian approach, I don't think guilty-until-proven-innocent is a justifiable way to keep it down, furthermore it makes the letters seem all the more unreasonable when they don't even have the balance of probabilities on their side, and it makes the whole concept of a TV licence seem all the more ridiculous.
It would surely be better to let the BBC fend for itself rather than let the state bully on its behalf for its money, and abolish the licence fee?
