Most RDBMS implementations on the web are generally only used to store data and perform very basic queries such as get and store operations. Personally I don't really see the issue of using one for a web applications since they are proven to work well and with the right design and caching solution are more than capable of handling a popular website such as Digg or Facebook. The only real issue with these sites is to prevent bottlenecks you would generally need to throw more hardware at it than may be necessary (although memory is very cheap these days so its a non-issue for most companies).

Memcached has shown to really help solve many performance issues for relational databases since the database won't constantly perform complex queries to grab data, it will just pull the result from a hashed index stored in memory. MemcachedDB http://memcachedb.org/memcachedb-guide-1.0.pdf is looking very promising to use to get rid of a RDBMS all together for certain data such as user sessions since it focuses on performance rather than functionality. Even then I think it all really boils down to choosing the right tool for the job, if there's data that you know is going to be a performance bottleneck in the database, you look for more creative solutions to store and process that data. There's nothing stopping you from running two or more different types of databases for the task at hand.

I also read The Age daily. If Murdoch has his way and starts charging for his news content online I just can't see the value of paying for it. The site is already riddled with ads and don't get me started on the video advertisements that play automatically when you read some articles. If we all have to pay for a subscription to get news from News Corp websites they wouldn't even consider dropping advertisements on the pages since it provides extra revenue. Like you pointed out, they definitely need to start look at making their websites have more value rather than just allowing users to read articles otherwise people are just going to jump to the next news outlet that has similar articles for free. Even then I would be hard pressed to sign up to a subscription if I can get my news elsewhere for free if they make the subscriptions only for a single site. If they made the subscriptions to cover all their news sites and make an interface like Google News to view all their articles from their news outlets, I might be tempted to pay for it then.

The BBC got in trouble when they took control of a botnet for one of their technology shows: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/mar/12/bbc-botnet-legality-questioned. While this research was performed in the US, I think they must have broken a law somewhere. I don't see how grabbing personal info obtained illegally for the sake of research, even if they didn't infect the computers originally, makes it permissible under US law.