[Stuart]

The real downside to all of this is it seems more likely that the Press will be more heavily regulated. I say this is a downside because inevitably, someone somewhere will find a way to use that regulation to their advantage, and use it to stop the press from reporting on something we need to know.

I'm thinking along the lines of what happened with the Super Injunctions. I read in Private Eye that while the press were going on about various celebrities doing things they shouldn't, then getting super injunctions to stop the press talking about it, a few groups of people were doing something rather more serious, using Super Injunctions to cover what they were doing, and going largely unreported.

So, while I don't normally agree with Conspiracy Theorists, we could end up in a situation where a group of people does something highly illegal, serious and possibly dangerous, yet we don't know about it because the News of the World thought that as part of their obsession with Milly Dowler, that they needed to know everything people were saying to her family.