When the BBC announced earlier that its international Web presence would begin to feature advertising, it stood to reason that its formidable foreign service would compete for --- and often win --- advertising at others' expense.
Emily Bell, the Guardian's digital leader, has surfaced to call the initiative an "enormous state-funded intervention into the international news advertising market."
This is no small statement.
BBC has roughly eight million unique visitors from outside the U.K., so its clout is significant in the digital space.