Not content with its persistent dumbing down of Radio 3 and 4 in a desperate attempt to bring younger listeners to the stations (who could just tune into the ones aimed at them, such as Radio 1 and 1Xtra) the BBC has now made a radical change to its web presence. After using bbc.co.uk for over thirty years, the UK's state broadcaster has moved from the ICANN-controlled DNS root to bbc.eth on the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).
ENS domains are mostly popular with Twitter users willing to pay Elon Musk to have a blue tick after the .eth address proudly shown in their display name to help promote the crypto fraud of the week or to flog the arbitrary receipt of an ugly procedurally generated monkey JPEG that they paid too much for three years ago (also known as a non-fungible token or NFT). Perhaps the BBC has decided that since everything with this demographic revolves around spending money on things of questionable value they can also tempt them into buying a UK TV licence for Β£180 a year.
The main issue they face at present is that bbc.eth cannot be resolved by most browsers or devices because it does not simply correspond to an IP address like a normal domain name. It is actually recorded on the Ethereum blockchain as a wallet address with a contenthash value for an Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) content identifier (CID). Luckily, fans of Eastenders and The Archers who don't want to download a new browser or extension can still access their favourite soaps with an IPFS gateway simply by adding the random-looking 59-character base32 string (such as bafybeigqyo555suvqi3scc2izft3mozskktbtkzs2xghoe2rpxetxbbdiqor) to the end of the URL ipfs.io/ipfs/.
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This is not the broadcaster's first foray into unusual top-level domain territory - back in 2023 it finally made proper use of its dotBrand TLD with the social.bbc Mastodon instance which runs a handful of accounts with the sole purpose of periodically reporting that they are still being run. But Mastodon is part of a larger network known as the fediverse which can be accessed by normal means and is mostly used by cynical Linux geeks who are probably much too old to be of any interest to the BBC. For whatever reason, the Beeb never made the jump to the definitely decentralised Bluesky network (which uses domain names as handles) with either bbc.co.uk or social.bbc - this now seems unlikely to change since .eth is incompatible with Bluesky and one can only hope they wouldn't be seen dead with the handle bbc.bsky.social.
And compatibility will certainly be an interesting challenge for the broadcaster when it comes to integrate the distributed storage system of IPFS into their bleeding-edge modern software stack. Including the dira! product suite which has seen more changes to its name than it has user interface in the last twenty years.
Crucially, to ease the minds of any worried licence-fee enjoyers, the BBC was keen to stress that no matter which internet naming system is being used, they will always be committed to re-enabling the autoplay function on iPlayer and Sounds regardless of your preferences or how many times you have disabled it.