In a globalised economy, we must dare to be world class

When is a "genuine criticism" not so genuine after all? Good question. When it is "motivated by commercial self-interest in order to restrict the BBC remit" (according to the corporation's glossy new policy statement on "Governance in the Ofcom age"). Axe-grinders, in short, can push off and grind somewhere else. Goodbye Rupert Murdoch and Gerald Kaufman; farewell Granada and Carlton. But, unless the governors throw a wobbly, I think I'd like to stay.

First, though, there are two things to declare which may - just about - add up to self-interest. The last month of reported figures for news website usage saw continuing triumph for Guardian Unlimited: 48.9 million page impressions recorded. That beat the FT (43.5 million) and walloped the Telegraph (33.9 million) and Times (29.3 million). No other paper's site came close to competing. But BBC News Online picked up 208 million.

And on Saturday night, of course, we watched BBC2 given over to the first night of BBC4 (the Beeb's latest £35m feast to set alongside its digital picnics for kids). High art, high culture; low but doubtless very distinguished viewing audiences. Hail to another fine initiative - except that it bodes no good for the prospects of Artsworld, an existing high culture channel in which the Guardian some time ago invested a little money.

So, there are my two possible axes: two BBC expansions - funded from the licence fee we all pay - which make it more difficult for competitors of any brand (like the Guardian) to build a news website that can punch its commercial weight - or for Artsworld to find the subscription base its ambitions demand. Is that a cause for concern? Can it be raised in public without catching "remit" blight? The difficulty is that once you brush aside the self-interested parties, you also close down the debate.

Yet there is a debate which needs, at last, to be acknowledged and argued through. It is a global debate for a globalised age. Simply: we have the film talent, the theatre and music talent, the journalistic and documentary talent - just as we have the international language which makes so much else possible. But where, in all that ocean of talent, is what our government would otherwise demand automatically? Where are Britain's world-class players?

Look in vain. Carlton and Granada - battered by recession, sliding ad revenues and the horror of a digital punt too far - are wounded giants, cutting back and striving to find a way of folding into each others' arms. They aren't setting off to conquer the world. Their pre-occupation is domestic survival.

We may, perhaps, weep few tears for them. We may, perfectly sentiently, conclude that they've inflicted many of their problems on themselves. (Somebody else could have punctured the absurd TV balloon called football.) But it's hard to leave the BBC totally out of this dismal equation. While ITV staggers from crisis to crisis, making ever cheaper shows and commissioning ever less serious news, the Beeb can afford to smile. It has the licence fee, £2.5bn rolling in with all the certainty of death and taxes. It does as well in recessions as in the good times: a tremendous competitive edge if you're playing the competitive game. As, of course, it is.

The theory - the gospel inherited from Birt and Hussey - is that the BBC must cover everything from pop to local radio to late-night sex. A complete service to match and protect the complete licence fee. That's where the websites come in; it is also why the digital expansions are flowing. Comprehensiveness is the underpinning of survival and the guarantee of charter renewal four years' hence.

But comprehensiveness also casts long shadows across the surrounding scenery. Is it coincidence that we don't have a world-class internet service provider? A film industry to match the French, Spanish or Australians - let alone the Americans? Why are our biggest publishers of books and magazines run from New York and mainland Europe? Where are the British TV shows which reach out to a US beyond public broadcasting?

It would be absurd to blame the Beeb for such a totality of failure; but it is not absurd to note the part it plays, time and again, in limiting ambition. The public interest is also the licence fee payers' interest. Those fees are paid here, at home. The charter and everything which stems from it is rooted here, at home. Though there's an FO-funded World Service and a TV BBC World, though co-production deals are done and programmes sold abroad, the operation - in global terms - is puny.

The BBC has an international reputation and helps keep our domestic radio and television standards reasonably high (though not always as high as legend would have it). But the price of that public interest here is a regulated environment which ends at Calais and a feebleness which has denied us any true global role. We have the reputation - but we don't have the clout that ought to go with it. The taxpayer, in a sense, pays twice over: he buys his licence and then watches Chancellor Brown offer fat tax breaks to rich investors in indigenous film-making which wouldn't be necessary if the market place wasn't skewed to begin with.

A debate? Between home excellence at a price and overseas impotence? About the hidden cost of the BBC? That's long overdue - and the collapse in confidence since September 11 makes it imperative. Tessa Jowell and her (ex-Beeb) special advisers will need to make their case as they wave more digital challengers through.

But the case itself has changed since the high water mark of Birtism. Now it isn't just a matter of whether the charter should stay, whether Ofcom should rule everything, whether the BBC can survive for another two or three decades. Now the question is what we'd have left if the corporation was dismantled.

America (another result for September 11) has just dramatically weakened the cross-ownership rules for media conglomerates: more vast mergers on the way. Perhaps it's too late for us to start playing that game. We haven't the stars left standing to compete. The last whistle is almost blown.

What we do have, though, is an independent state broadcasting company of some excellence bearing a brand the world trusts. Why hobble that with increasingly artificial restraints in an increasingly interconnected world? Why limit the things far away it could do well and fail to analyse the home things where its mission has crept too far?

The Birt debate was framed in trench warfare terms: every trench had to be filled with something. The new debate could be a deal more life-enhancing than that. How do you make BBC World more than an empty phrase? Which of the shackles ought to come off? Not questions of self-interest, you see: questions of real public interest.

· p.preston@guardian.co.uk