SO, THE big news is, who is going to pay for the news? Charlie tells me the internet is taking over the world.

Usually if I want to know anything, I just ask Charlie. After all, he picked the economic downturn before the World Bank and he told us about the signs of recovery 10 weeks before the International Monetary Fund worked it out. So when I asked Charlie about the future of news on the internet, he referred me to his personal trainer, Marty.

I know Marty. He's a cluey bloke - on top of everything and gets it all from the internet. Does he pay for it? No. Will he? Not likely. Marty talks like that. Short. Sentences.

But someone has to pay. Good news is expensive. Someone has to dig deep to get the facts to see who is telling porkies. Louise hates me using slang, so I will fall back on the line that Louise asked me to use: ''Who is it who is breaking the ninth commandment?''

I know what you are thinking - ''What is the ninth commandment and where is that Gideon's Bible that I nicked all those years ago?''

And then I hear you say, ''Oh, it doesn't matter, I'll just Google it.''

We know that the Gideon's was free and we can be pretty sure that the Gideon's people don't mind us pinching them even though it costs something to print and distribute their 60 million copies of the Good Book.

But the Google info is completely free. We pay for the printing if we want a hard copy and we pay for the distribution with our internet account. However, some publishers are claiming that Google is doing to them what I did with the Gideon's.

Increasingly, everyone is getting the information they want, including the news, and not paying for it. But now the big publishers have started planning a worldwide program to get readers to pay for the information they have been giving away for the past 10 years. Everyone, sellers and buyers alike, are going to the web, and quickly. The next big wave on the internet will be surfed by the retailers as they find clever ways to sell their products.

And that's a worry for the traditional newspapers and magazines. The retailers have very big advertising funds that no print publisher wants to see walk out the door as the classifieds have done.

And the ways to use the internet are exploding as mobile phones continue to perform further functions, including everything from global positioning to sports telecasts - even phone calls.

My bet is that, one way or another, we'll all pay for what we use. Exactly how this is achieved is exercising some of the smartest commercial brains on earth.

I tried to convince the editor to experiment with this column by publishing a blank space with just a Spooner cartoon and a headline link to a paid website. All cartoonists think they carry columnists anyway.

The editor might not be quite ready for it yet, but I reckon his owner is.

And, by the way, what about the ninth commandment? Have you got it yet?

Harold Mitchell is executive chairman of Mitchell Communication Group.