I see that Ofcom has fined the Daily Mail General Trust £225,000 for its premature closure of the Teletext TV public service last December. By its licence it should have soldiered on till 2014.
Yet Ofcom was partly to blame for the closure. In early 2009, it publicly questioned the point of Teletext editorial beyond 2014 -"The increasing availability of text based services, both broadcast and online, may mean that post 2014 there is no longer clear justification for continued intervention to maintain a public service teletext licence," the regulator said.
How wonderful that Ofcom was happy to hoover up Teletext cash while trashing the source - and is then free to fine DMGT for not ignoring the regulator's damaging pessimism. Teletext was (and still is) a commercial enterprise: it was unlikely to build new business once the Ofcom suited scrotes pretended to be seers and expressed doubts about the company's public service future.
I'm surprised the DMGT sleepyheads didn't make this point in defence. And, incidentally, the Mail's Jan Moir homophobic fans may want to sign up to Teletext's Gay Rabbit dating service - a nice revenue stream for DMGT coffers.
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