The message couldn’t be clearer: Don’t expect media ownership regulation to ease up anytime soon. In a hefty report published today by the House of Lords Communications Committee, it firmly rejected the notion that the fierce competition brought on by the proliferation of new platforms and new technology to access the news means that media regulation can be left to market forces. If anything, the Lords sought to draw a line in the sand over the decline of news quality, noting that much of news available on the internet was simply rehashed from the same existing sources anyway.

Most intriguingly, the report urged the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to look into ways of getting news aggregators—including Google—to invest in news gathering. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has argued that it doesn’t sell ads on Google News, and thus makes no money from the news gathering done by others, but the Committee dismissed this argument, noting that the site contributes to the “profile and popularity of the whole Google brand.”

The Committee also made some 30 recommendations to existing media regulations, including most importantly, strengthening Ofcom’s power and giving it the ability to launch its own investigations into media mergers. Currently, only ministers have the power to decide whether a merger warrants a public interest inquiry—which Lord Fowler noted could be swayed by political considerations.

The committee also recommended that the Competition Commission and Ofcom should clearly split their responsibilities when a deal is being examined, with the Competition Commission looking strictly at the competition issues, and Ofcom handling the public interest side. This would avoid the embarrassing situation last year that followed the examination by both the Commission and Ofcom into BSkyB’s purchase a 17.9 percent stake in ITV; the two entities came to two different conclusions.

Release | Full Report: House of Lords Communications Committee,“The Ownership of the News”