BBC News iPad app not available in the UK - unjustifiable

Recently I have been trying to find a good general news app for my shiny new iPad. There are a few out there but what I really wanted was something that provides content of the quality of the BBC News website in an iPad friendly form. Unfortunately I could not find a BBC News iPad app when I looked.

Imagine my bemusement then when I discovered today that there actually is such an app and it has been (unsurprisingly) downloaded over a million times globally but that it is not available in the UK. Apparently the BBC Trust is worried that it might hurt the domestic commercial media market.

This is surely unjustifiable. It is the BBC. That first B stands for British. How can it be right that the rest of the world has a nice application to get BBC news content on the premier tablet computer platform and yet in the country where the license fee is levied that pays for the gathering of this content we are denied it?

Why does this same rule not apply to the BBC website for example? Surely that competes with things like subscriptions for The Times online and the Financial Times' paid for digital offering?

In my view, either the BBC releases this app in the UK, or it withdraws it altogether. It is totally unacceptable for the rest of the world to have access to this whilst we in Britain do not.