As the BBC launches, or considers new services, in areas like education, video on demand, music downloads and the provision of news and other services to mobiles, the question of its influence on market impact inevitably comes to the fore.
When the long awaited White Paper arrives this week - or next - media regulator Ofcom may be given a wider role looking at whether and how, BBC services - like it recently launched education tool BBC Jam - "distort" the market.
The FT this morning re-opens the arguments - giving James Parnell a glowing CV in the process - saying Tessa Jowell has decided that Ofcom will have some sort of external influence over what the BBC launches, which ought to please commercial rivals that fear that letting the proposed BBC Trust - the board of governors by any other name - assess the market impact on its own, will open the door to a flood of new services.
While it's unlikely that few of the BBC's competitors would be opposed to suggestions that it starts making money from overseas visitors to its web sites, they don't want the BBC to be given a - subsidised - free rein to launch new domestic services.
The BBC has promised that all new services will be subject to a rigorous new service license, you only have to look at downloads - Beethoven anyone? - Or the new interactive media player - to see that, despite those promises, the cart sometimes comes before the horse.
Services get developed and refined and in doing so acquire a sort of inevitable logic of their own, so by the time the BBC comes to launch them, opposition is effectively sidelined.
So unless someone like Ofcom or even the European Commission, which yesterday said it would examine the role of public service broadcasters and their mission creep onto new platforms, comes in to guide the BBC, then commercial rivals might as well withdraw - as many small educational suppliers did after Ms Jowell handed the BBC the digital curriculum, launched as BBC Jam in January.
While the BBC should be allowed to develop services that enhance or expand its public service remit, crashing into areas well served by commercial suppliers doesn't help consumers.
Unless, of course, you argue that the BBC does telly, the internet, radio, local news and downloads better than anyone else that it should be allowed carte blanche to do so.
