As Clay Shirky has put it so memorably, for the newspaper industry, the glaciers have arrived.
This has provided a useful backdrop for some spectacular special pleading from media owners.
The need to rescue journalism has, for industry lobbyists, been rapidly translated into a need to feather-bed dying industries that have shown no interest in the promotion of any reasonable standard of journalism for some decades.
So alongside the special pleading for the removal of media concentration, cross-media ownership and monopoly rules, all of these demands run concurrent with the kind of geographic consolidation that is removing local journalists and creating top-down managerial 'news factories' that have nothing to do with the local communities that they serve, as this report from my old manor illustrates.
It remains to be seen if any slackening of regulation will run alongside obligations to invest, but I wouldn't hold your breath on that score.
But the obligation to invest is key here. And if the newspaper industry should be obliged to invest in the production of content in return for regulatory leniency, surely other carriers should also be asked to invest in the content that drives the demand for their services?
I don't know about you, but when I sign up to that broadband deal and pay for an increase in the capacity of the pipe that comes into my house, I'm not drooling over loads of ones-and-zeros. I'm thinking about all of the great content that I can download. Content carriers have made billions on the back of content producers, and the producers have not seen a commensurate benefit by any means.
Here, the broadcasting unions BECTU and the NUJ have done the groundwork that OfCOM should have done. Obliging carriers to invest in public service-standard content is a proposition that is long overdue. Read it and spread the word - it's a hugely important piece of research - and you can't expect it to be talked up by many industry lobbyists....
About the author: Paul is a London-based blogger with a mixed track-record over at Never Trust a Hippy and a few other places. He usually writes about representative democracy and decentralisation. Follow him at www.twitter.com/paul0evans if you usually do that kind of thing. Read more from this author