Ever since the birth of internet media in the early 1990s, a fierce argument has raged as to whether consumers should have to pay directly for what they read, watch and listen to on net.

At first, paid subscriptions seemed the obvious way to go, but soon the power of free, advertising-based offerings became clear, and many in the technology world especially backed the idea that almost everything ought to be free. When a company like Viacom demands, as it did last week, that Google remove all Viacom TV clips from YouTube, it's derided as a dinosaur that can't understand the value that free YouTube marketing will bring.

Yet what's interesting to me in watching this latest corporate tug-of-war play out is how much disagreement there still is over the many questions associated with paid versus free. In the music business, the success of Apple iTunes seemed to validate a traditional paid model in which you buy a song but are blocked, by DRM software, from sending that song to others. Yet a lot of people think services that don't use copy protection – and thus implicitly invite free sharing – will yet prove to be important.

In the TV business, some companies, such as NBC, have decided that free distribution of selected material does more good than harm, but others, like Viacom, have taken a different view. Among newspaper and magazine publishers, free websites predominate, but the exceptions – notably the Wall Street Journal Online – are important enough to keep the debate alive.

When the Financial Times recently began to offer a lot more of its site free, without officially saying so, it underscored the continued uncertainties the best model for online journalism Similarly, comments from a New York Times executive last week indicate that the internal discussions about the wisdom and positioning of the Times Select subscription service are anything but settled.

I'm a firm believer in copyright law and the idea that creators should be paid for their work, but I run up against the paid versus free conundrum all the time. We don’t charge for access to New West and have never seriously considered doing so. But how about when, say, a small community publication without any money wants to run a story from New West. If we get prominent branding and/or links back to New West, is that valuable enough to give away the story for free?

And how about when a site uses a large excerpt from one of our stories, one too large to be covered by the fair use laws, and sells advertising against that content? Should we be happy to have the promotion, or should we call our lawyer? The blogosphere, generally, adheres to the former idea, but I don’t think it's settled.

We're also on the other side of this question sometimes. We have for example a very robust New West photo group on Flickr, and when we see an especially good photo in that group we ask the photographer if we might post it (for no fee) on New West. It seems like it would be helpful for many photographers to get this kind of exposure, aka marketing, for their work. In general they agree, but it's not necessarily a simple issue.

Google, of course, is the leading proselytizer for all things free, which is what you would expect from a company that invented the most efficient and effective advertising machine the world has ever seen. But even Google has conceded in principle that for all the marketing benefits that Jon Stewart might gain from having his shows in YouTube, a bit of that Google cash would make it a fairer deal.

All of these uncertainties show pretty clearly that for all the dramatic changes of the past decade, the internet-driven transformation of the media business is still in its very early stages. I think we'll be arguing about free versus paid for quite some time to come.