This is either the daftest or scariest idea that's yet been formulated to try and protect newspaper revenues.
It's daft because the Web is links. Take away the connections and you no longer have a network.
But that's a scary prospect; if the newspaper industry succeeds in lobbying for this kind of legislation, the idea of an open Web is under threat.
It's an idea that chimes nicely with some of the national security havers that we hear from governments too: if the legislation is to be enforced then the use of the Web has to be restricted and monitored.
Throw in the rise of the cloud and you could have the ingredients for a fundamental challenge to the way the Web has developed until now.

The problem with Twitter is fitting your message into just 140 characters. It's something that Dave Winer's talked about before and he's now come up with a method of determing how long tweets should be allowed to be
The reason I'm raising this is because of my last post, where I picked up on a tweet from Steve Yelvington.
When you read his blog post about "death to the death of journalism meme" you get a much more considered view of things: papers are losing money; several are in real danger; but some are still doing ok and will survive into the future, albeit by changing their business model as they go. Video did not kill the radio star.
I can't disagree with this really. I think papers will be around for a good while to come; some folk still have black and white tellies - it takes time for the new technology to become ubiquitous.
But the world's changing so quickly now that I don't think it will be long until the use value of newspapers becomes so devalued in comparison to other forms of news media, that they find themselves no longer used as vehicles for journalism. Niche newspapers like The Economist and weekly locals might carry on longer than others, but national and regional dailies?

When I was working at Southide Media and changing things as we went along, one of the models I came across was Bluffton Today. From there I started following Steve Yelvington's blog.
And now I follow him on Twitter too.
Today on Twitter, he asked: "If bunches of newspapers make 30 pct profit margins in depths of recession, does that mean 'death of newspapers' meme is BS?"
He then posted a link to these numbers which I'd actually seen before.
And then he followed up with: "The big mistake in reporting about newspaper 'woes' is to look just at a few big metros. They do not represent the broader newspaper biz."
But these figures are out of date. As Jim Hopkins himself says in a post under the blog entry:
"All the papers were profitable as of a year ago -- except for the Detroit Free Press. Since then, however, any number of Gannett papers may have become money losers this year after the housing bubble's collapse and the nation's dip into a recession. Papers most at risk would be those that had low, single-digit margins a year ago."
Not a good base to build an argument on.

Looks like the owners of the Wee County News are doing well enough.
I'm glad that some people out there are making a go of local newspapers. I've only seen the Wee County once - when I was in Alloa during the last Westminster elections for the Politics Show - and it was a good read.
I've not seen their Eastwood paper yet. In fact I didn't know it existed, which is pretty bad because it's on the border of the patch that Southside Media covered and it's where I went to high school.
Elsewhere however, things are not looking so rosy for local newspaper owners. The NUJ has launched its own plan to inject a bit of fiscal stimulus.
It's been met with some scepticism though.
For me, the case against the existing newspaper owners - smaller players like the Wee County maybe excepted - is open and shut. They should not get a penny of government support. If you're a Plc, forget it.
For years, these companies have racked up incredible profit margins. Instead of investing in the papers they owned, they distributed dividends to shareholders and used some of their profits as leverage to take on huge debts in order to acquire more papers.
The communities they served - the people who bought their papers, the advertisers who stuck with them - saw very little improvement in their local newspapers for the investment they were putting in.

I got a namecheck on Paul Bradshaw and Jon Hickman's podcast.
I'd asked via Twitter: "Will sites like Help Me Investigate will always need some kind of professional journalist/mentor/organiser/news cadre?"
(I could have done with someone like that to sub out the un-needed second 'will')
Here's Paul's reply:
"No is the short answer. The only difference between a professional journalist and a non-professional journalist is that a professional journalist happens to get paid.
"There are lots of examples of outstanding journalism by people who are not paid to be journalists. I'm talking about activism, engaged citizens and creative people.
"The model that we're adopting is that it needs some sort of leadership, for want of a better word, to help shape that community and establish the rules of that community. That's a lesson that the websites have learned - Wikipedia is a great example.
"But I think the idea is that the culture of the website becomes strong enough and the users have advanced to such a point that they can maintain their own culture. We'll need to wait and see if that actually happens."
I think that idea of creating the culture by exhortation and example is really powerful. I used the phrase 'news cadre' in my question. I like it. I'm going to keep it. I think journalists need to become news cadres.
Just to be clear - I don't believe you need a professional journalist to have legitimate journalism. I agree with Paul Bradshaw about that 100%.
But I think there will always be a need for news cadres. Look how groups within communities organise themselves: people come together for a specific purpose, whether it's to set up a bowling club or protest against the closure of a park. They elect people to different tasks. If their work grows, then they employ people to carry out tasks on their behalf.

I've realised that I've been looking a lot at what's been happening in the US newspaper industry.
That's partly because that's where papers are really suffering at the moment. It's also because through Twitter I've discovered a lot of smart people in the States who are talking about what the decline of the traditional newspaper model means for journalism and how the traditional media companies there are failing to deal with the changing times.
But I saw something this week which confirms that media companies on this side of the Atlantic are just as short-sighted and uncaring about the communities they serve.
Across central Scotland Trinity Mirror is closing local newspaper offices and merging production centres. One of the papers affected is the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser.
This is one of the papers I grew up with. It would be delivered to my gran's house in Plains every week, full of local news: everything from the latest carry-on at Monklands District Council, to the real parish pump stuff from the villages. As kids, we'd look at the Sammy Squirrel page to see whose parents had stumped up the cash for them to have a photo and birthday greeting printed in the paper.
The Advertiser is a good local paper, providing a real community service. It's well-known for its campaigning journalism, with the best example maybe being the campaign to save A&E services at Monklands District Hospital - a campaign it led from the front, and won.

If the new models of journalism create ways of giving communities the power to tell their own stories to each other, then I suppose that's in line with 'Power to the People'.
But the models that survive will be the ones that do that successfully. So I suppose that's 'Power from the People'.
Here's a great example of how that power from the people can turn into an income stream.
So could ENGAGEMENT=INCOME?
I liked these thoughts about engagement. Especially this:
"every time I have watched a newspaper focus group, I felt like it never got at what people truly think and feel. The artificiality of the focus group affects what the participants say, and in the end, it’s just not the real deal. It isn’t that they’re lying, but they are trying to make a good impression — not only on the people asking the questions but also on the other participants, who are strangers to them."
That reminded me of The Wisdom of Crowds. People always make the right decisions, but only under the right circumstances. They have to be informed, have the chance to ask questions and be able to make their final decision on their own initiative without being affected by the opinions of others. Aggregate the answers and the outcome is - almost invariably - spot on.
I always though that online news community sites would a great model for that kind of deliberation. Back to 'Power to the People'.

Reading this really useful advice for the newspaper industry from Mark Glaser was a joy and a source of pain.
It's a joy because I can't fault it. There's not one thing that I don't agree with. There's not one thing that wouldn't help newspapers re-position themselves as champions of a news community.
It's painful because Southside Media ticked so many of these boxes.
Not that we did at first. At first, my vision was veru much based on my experiences as a reporter on weekly newspapers. The dead trees and ink were important to me. I thought that was the only game in town. Our first website was a travesty - story teasers with an exhortation to buy the paper, alongside a phone number and email address.
One of the many people who helped me back then was an amazing woman called Hannah Clinch. She always said that the paper had to be something different from that model; it had to be rooted in the community, with their active participation and sense of ownership.
She got me on the road to using Open Source software and introduced me to Drupal which became the framework for our social networks.
If I'd listened to her more and concentrated on helping the community talk to itself instead of creating a paper that talked to them, things might have been different.
But, that's not to say we didn't do good things. We did. I'm very proud still, of the papers, the social networks, the people who worked on them and the people who helped us from the communities we served.
And at the end of two years, I'd say we were well on the way to looking like something that Mark Glaser would have approved of.

I think journalism needs journalists. I don't mean journalists working in the way we've worked up to now; I mean a group of people who are information miners, crafters and publishers who are able to encourage people to get involved in the news-creation process and help them organise themselves. News cadres.
I wondered how much it would cost society to have this group of people.
Here are some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
There are around 38,000 members of the NUJ.
The average annual salary of journalists in NUJ-recognised workplaces in 2005 was £37,000. Let's be generous and say £38,000.
That's a total cost of £1,444,000,000 a year.
So what would people have to pay in order to fund that? Well, there are around 11 million newspaper readers in the UK.
So that's £131.27 per reader per year. Or 36p a day.
Which I think must be in the ballpark of being the average cover price of a daily newspaper in the UK.
Which means that - as thing stand - the public are paying enough to cover the salaries of UK journalists.
So, given that, could a pay-what-you-like model be a possible model for any of those 38,000 journalists looking to start something new?

I read this after Jay Rosen quoted from it in the latest Rebooting the News podcast.

"We are not part of an elite. We are part of the working class, which is exactly how journalists have seen themselves through most of American history - as working stiffs. We can be underpaid, we can be jerked around, we can be laid off arbitrarily - just like any autoworker or mechanic or hotel housekeeper or flight attendant.

"But there is this difference: A laid-off autoworker doesn't go into his or her garage and assemble cars by hand. But we - journalists - we can't stop doing what we do.

"As long as there is a story to be told, an injustice to be exposed, a mystery to be solved, we will find a way to do it. A recession won't stop us. A dying industry won't stop us. Even poverty won't stop us because we are all on a mission here. That's the meaning of your journalism degree. Do not consider it a certificate promising some sort of entitlement. Consider it a license to fight."

This has chimed with me in a way I can't explain. I feel inspired by it. but also shamed. I've a lot of thinking to do.