Using a little understood provision of the merger rules, the government has asked Ofcom to take a look at the Sky stake in ITV, just in case the OFT did not come up with the right answer the first time round. As a result of the intervention, Ofcom will decide whether the share purchase reduced the number of separately managed broadcasters in the UK. Since this is almost exactly what the OFT is already doing, it is impossible to see how Ofcom could reach a different conclusion to the OFT. In this sense, the intervention has little point

Set for launch in May/June, the BBC’s iPlayer is a PC-based application offering live and on-demand access to around 3,500 hours of BBC programmes per week via the internet, using peer-to-peer (P2P) and multi-cast technology to overcome cost and bandwidth issues

Yell UK is the dominant supplier of Classified Advertising Directory Services (CDAS) in the UK. Its principal competitor is BT but, as a natural monopoly, it is regulated, and has just undergone a sector review lifting the price caps currently in place. What does the future now hold for Yell, and more generally for CDAS, which has been the only growth sector in print classified advertising since 2004?

H3G has removed roaming charges for customers roaming onto its own overseas networks. While reducing roaming prices can be partially, or even fully, compensated for by elasticity effects, removing them altogether has far more limited direct compensations, especially when consumers are on bundle tariffs