Barely a day passes in which a story doesn't emerge about Rupert Murdoch's determination to charge for content. If he isn't speaking about it himself, his senior executives are doing so.

The latest example, reported by Bobbie Johnson, saw News Corp's deputy chairman, Chase Carey, suggesting that Hulu, the hugely popular TV and video streaming site in the US, could start charging users.

He didn't say it would definitely do so. But even announcing that it might is part of a Murdochian script just now, a propaganda exercise to tell the world - and, most importantly, News Corp's partners and rivals - that paying for content is The Way Ahead.

He is, in effect, trying to spin us into the belief that the freedom of exchange exemplified by the internet is a bad thing. It makes it impossible for content-providers to profit from their content and thereby reduces the likelihood of those providers having enough revenue to provide more content.

Think about that for a moment. It is a classic example of both media mogul arrogance and desperation. It suggests that the current media corporations have a divine right to produce movies, TV programmes, music and journalism and, in so doing, to reproduce themselves. They must be preserved at all costs.

Will the public accept that? Are they convinced that what Murdoch (and the others) have to offer is so unique, of such high quality and impossible to do without that they will pay for it?

Hulu, an advertising-supported free-to-air site (not available in Britain), is popular precisely because it is free. Owned jointly by

News Corp's Fox division, Disney and NBC, it has built an audience since 2007 with shows such as House, The Simpsons and Lost.

It's a great site, but given that it's a catch-up service, providing second-run showings, it's extremely unlikely that too many people will wish to pay.

In justifying a possible subscription model, Carey says: "I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content." That's an interesting phrase, coming straight from a commercial textbook: capturing value.

Similarly, Murdoch has spoken of the need to erect paywalls to overcome a "malfunctioning" business model. But the net is a functioning non-business model, of course, one of the major reasons for it being so loved by people.

No wonder that a survey by Lightspeed Research into the likelihood of people paying for newspaper-related content came up with such startling results. It found that 91% of its respondents "would never pay" for online news and 90% wouldn't pay for analysis.

I accept that people are bound to say that when the question is hypothetical, so there would be defectors from the purist position should they be required to pay.

But Murdoch, and those media corporations he is trying to persuade to join his paid content crusade, are going to get a nasty surprise.

Despite his success with BSkyB and pay-TV, there is no parallel with content on the internet.