BBC on the Dark Web

January 2020

It’s easy to forget that the BBC has one of the most used websites in the world.  In fact, the BBC website is the sixth most popular in the UK (measured by visitor numbers) beaten only by American sites from Google, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon.

similarweb.com, which measures these things, says it 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 that 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 cost 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 a fairly bold step and launched its international news service on the sinister sounding ‘dark web’, which will make it more readily available to those who are denied access the usual way.   This dark web is not as ominous as it sounds; it simply refers to the huge amount of the internet that is not available to 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 Network) was created by the US Navy  to allow users to keep their identity and location hidden; 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, but 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 shortwave transmissions that were once used reach the rest of the world, especially countries which banned the BBC.  World Service is still broadcast on shortwave 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 but 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.

A few links...

The Tor Project
https://www.torproject.org/

Tor is a not-for-profit organisation, and you can download the browser, or find out more, from this site.

The BBC Tor site
https://www.bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion/

Once you have downloaded and installed the Tor browser, you can use it to go to this address - the BBC’s dark web site.  It’s the same as the usual site, though.

Web statistics

https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-kingdom

similarweb.com – this site collects an astonishing amount of data on websites (there are few secrets on the internet).  This page is all about UK based sites.

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