OFCOM PSP BoonDoggle still being designed by committee

The usual array of sycophants has wasted a huge amount of brain power replying to the OFCON PSP paper. Most of the 76 responses were basically a refinement of OFCOMs vision with the aim of giving the respondents more than their fair share of the taxpayers bounty; OFCON is a happy bunny and gives the respondants a general thumbs up.

Anyway here are my personal favourite extracts:

An extract from Saul Albert about a gathering down at OFCOMs palatial offices down at the Riverside:

I worked out what my civic duty was going to be when the 'creative' director at Wanadoo suggested that the PSP's 100M budget should be given to the telcos and ISPs for their wonderful PSP-like job of carrying peer to peer network traffic, and nobody batted an eyelid.

WEL Jackson can’t resist having a pop at one of the editors of the UK few new media success stories (The Register) which didn't get a penny of the taxpayers bounty to help them out when times were tough:

As a self-actualizing media node, I welcome this redistribution of government funds from provincial luddites to new media 'creative' Sohoites.
Cool Britannia lives! The creative industries initiative was good but didn't radically empower young creatives and their 360-degree thinking. Unleash the collective wisdom of new media and see us swarm!
If Tony had done this when he first got in (and I know how hard you tried, Ed) then thousands of people could already be employed - let's use those redundant factories to turn out polyphonic ringtones.
Critics - like Orlowski at The Register - will complain that this is pork-barrel politics for tech. utopians. That this has no relevance to' 'ordinary' people and their lives.
Well, I've had enough of that patronising rubbish. I've launched a post-ironic web brand - nar.ciss.us - that was created using the competitively-priced labour of redundant industrial workers. It shows that anyone can 'get' asynchronous java - even people from the North.
If anyone wants to brainstorm this - then twitter/IM/SMS/Skype/email me. I'm up for an 'emergent conference'.
Ed Richards's initiative 'gets' new media on so many levels. Let's flashmob this bitch up to escape velocity.

Dr Stephen Jones hits OFCOM with brute logic:

The consultation document is founded on several dubious premises.
The report states that new media displaces old media, and that public service material should therefore be targeted at new platforms. However, as commentators have pointed out, new media enhances old media. Nor is there a rationale for public investment in platforms where the barriers to entry are already low,and where private investment is plentiful. The PSP idea in its current form is little more than a taxpayer-funded subsidy for web production houses. OFCOM should instead fulfill its commitment to strengthening public service broadcast material.

I didn’t know we had a King, but it didn’t stop him having a totally unrelated pop at Sky, which although completely irrelevant OFCOM decided to give the Public Service Publishing treatment:

I read that Sky are seeking to run pay per view services on the Digital terrestrial platform. I strongly believe that Sky have enough means to broadcast at the moment and I think this is anti choice and competition. I also think that we all should have access to quality High Definition content without the need to subscribe to the sky service. This would create real choice and real competition.

A career limiting move by Mark Splinter - too truthful for any bureaucrat to agree with:

A horse designed by committee
As a freelance designer working in the music industry since 1999, I have plenty of experience of listening to clueless executives struggling to understand the complexities of the internet. It is an ancient problem for creative people that they require the approval of the incumbent bureaucracy in order to disseminate their work widely. The internet has only partially solved this problem, and is dominated anyway by large corporations who own the very blogging and social networking services that are supposedly destroying them.
I will be brief, and summarise the problem as follows:
The Suits don't know how to create, but they try anyway.

Good for Teletext - the last cries of a dying beast past its sell by date:

Teletext does not believe that there is currently enough evidence that there is need or public desire for a new media Public Service Publisher.

Styles managed to sum up my personal feelings admirably:

I am vigorously opposed to:
a) the setting up of a boondoggle financing the new media
and
b) the continued existence of Channel 4, never mind it getting any money from this new boondoggle.
The only appropriate approach to Channel 4 is to salt the earth and flog off the freqencies. The justification for Channel 4 in its genesis in the Open Channel mentioned in the Annan report no longer applies, and there is nothing in the nonsense it broadcasts that justifies a privileged status and government ownership.
It is ironic that this nonsense is being touted at roughly the same time that the BBC Trust has suspended BBC Jam, presumably because its use of licence payers money is viewed as 'unfair' by the same people hoping to benefit from this pot of taxpayers' money

Anyway, if someone has a spare hour or two to kill and wants a laugh especially at the amount of effort that Channel 4 obviously put in its reply check the responses out here.