As a percentage of all advertising revenue in the United States, newspapers have been steadily shrinking for the past 50 years. It was only recently that things tipped to the point where newspapers were losing money instead of turning a profit.

An old hierarchy wants the newspaper industry to survive. Whether from personal business interests, nostalgia, or an inability to use the internet, there is a subset of individuals who want things to stay the same. In fact, the FTC is holding preliminary discussions on how to put the industry in to cryostasis.

The web has been the best thing to happen to investigative journalism. While critics regularly claim that bloggers just regurgitate and repost articles from traditional news organizations it is bloggers and web publishers who regularly have their stories jacked without any citation or credit. No longer are stories “sat on” by editors for weeks or months, stories are released instantly for people to make up their own minds about.

Here are some of the “considerations” the FTC is currently looking at:
- Restricting news aggregators. Good bye, Google News.
- Preventing others from republishing facts from a news story until after an extended amount of time. Good bye, live search results from Twitter.
- Limiting copyright fair use. Good bye Google Image Search (FTC specifically notes the Perfect 10 case.)
- Surcharges added on to all monthly ISP bills.
- Exempting news organizations from anti trust laws. Hey, if we all block Google in robots.txt then no one will go there when they want news, right?
- Government subsidies.
- Tax breaks.

In the FTC’s defense, they give pretty strong counterpoints to everything but additional government subsidies & tax breaks. Whats scary is that someone at a government regulatory agency which is supposed to protect consumers would take any of these ideas more seriously than cracking down on abductions by aliens in flying saucers.