For a decade now, consumers have become accustomed to free access to music, films and information, via the internet. But with many of the media’s big players – including Rupert Murdoch – thinking of charging for content, is the tide about to turn?

And yet for almost a decade now, quality entertainment and culture, as well as mainstream sources of news, have been freely available on the web. The arrival of the internet has seen musicians, publishers and news organizations all slowly float off together into uncharted waters.

Consumers who have grown up during the past 15 years are completely at home in a world where much of what they want to hear, see or read will cost them nothing. True, in the case of some films and TV shows, the practices involved may skirt around the law a bit. Generally speaking, though, culture has become a happy free-for-all. Now may be the time to pay the bill.

One of the biggest players in the game last week questioned the rationale behind the current give-away culture.  Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corp, even went so far as to refer to it as a “flawed” business model when he spoke to reporters in New York. The media mogul – who owns the Times, Sunday Times, Sun and News of the World in Britain, as well as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in America – announced that he was considering charging for more of his internet sites.

It is worth noting, too, that opposing political ideologies are at work here, not simply commercial forces. While the libertarian impulse to “free the web” is claimed by hippy counter-culture, it is also aligned with far-right thought. Pirate Bay, the Swedish bootlegging site at the center of a legal storm this year, receives financial support from right-wing politician Carl Lundström.

This battle is worth watching…will info remain free or will only thoise who can afford it, have it?