As you may know, Rupert Murdoch and his son James are engaged in a bitter dispute with the BBC over all sorts of things. This puts me in a tricky spot. Obviously, Rupert and James Murdoch are my bosses, not just here at The Sunday Times but also at The Sun, for which I write a column on Saturdays. I am therefore inclined to nod vigorously when they suggest the licence fee should be scrapped and all BBC web activities halted forthwith.

But I am also employed by the BBC, which means I am inclined to nod vigorously whenever the director-general says the BBC is a fantastic institution and the envy of every nation in the world. This means I’ve been doing an awful lot of vigorous nodding in the past few months.

It’s not just sycophancy either. I really do believe that both sides have a point.

If you are paying your licence fee, you should be entitled to view the programmes you funded on whatever platform happens to suit your mood and lifestyle. If you wish to watch the news on your mobile phone and Autumnwatch on your computer, then it is the BBC’s duty to make that possible.

But that puts all newspapers, not just this one, in a difficult position. Running a website is ferociously expensive. I see the bills for the Top Gear site and it makes my eyes explode. And, of course, while it is possible to meet some of that cost with advertising, it should be remembered that every penny earned by the website is a penny in lost revenue for the printed newspaper.

The only realistic solution is to make people pay to see the site. But who’s going to do that when the BBC is providing a news service for nothing? We therefore face the real possibility of various newspapers going out of business, which, combined with the problems at ITV and Channel 4, could mean the BBC becomes the only news-gathering organisation in the country. This would be an extremely bad thing.

Of course, the two main political parties have massively oversimplified the debate. You have Jeremy Hunt for the Tories saying he’s going to execute everyone at the BBC and put their heads on spikes. And Ben Bradshaw for Labour saying he’s going to execute everyone at News International. Either way, I’m going to be killed.

Which is why I have been examining the argument carefully and I’ve decided that the biggest issue in all of this is the internet. It’s a monster. An invisible machine over which mankind has absolutely no control. We can’t even turn it off.

Let us start by listing the good things it has achieved. Well, er, it is now possible to find out where James Garner was born without going to the library and order your Sunday lunch without going to the shops. And there are some jolly funny things on YouTube.

But now let’s look at some of the bad things. Well, your children are being bullied mercilessly on Facebook and there is no one you can contact to have the bullying stopped, your husband is spending most of his evenings baring his private parts to some Ukrainian girl, your wife has rekindled a childhood romance, the twin towers have been knocked down, Stephen Fry has been driven to the edge of another breakdown, you have to spend half your day answering pointless emails, there is unimaginable cruelty in almost every blog, where the rules of defamation seem not to apply, and James Garner was not born, as suggested on one site, in Chicago.

It gets worse. Only a few weeks ago my colleague James May scuttled off into a Romanian wood to have a pee, the event was captured on a phone and now it’s on the internet. And there is absolutely nothing he can do to have it taken off. These are just the minor issues, the annoyances. The big problem is just round the corner: the bankrupting of everyone in the world of film, art, literature, news and music.

The fact is this. If something can be digitised, it can be stolen. You record a song, you sell one copy, it goes on the internet and it will be nicked. If you write a book, the same thing can happen. Newspapers, magazines, films, jokes, music: all of it can be, and is being, circulated for nothing, which means the person who wrote and prepared and slaved over the original product is not being paid. That’s not so bad if you are 10 and you’ve posted some mobile phone footage of your friend pulling funny faces on YouTube. But if you are running Paramount Pictures, it is very bad indeed.

I do not know how much it cost to make this year’s surprising hit comedy The Hangover, but it will have been several million dollars. None of that will have been recouped at the box office because the film stars no one you’ve ever heard of. But word of mouth means that some of the cash could be clawed back in DVD sales.

’Fraid not. Because this film is extremely popular with internet-savvy teenagers, it is being downloaded for nothing at an alarming rate. And, speaking as the host of the most illegally downloaded TV show in the world, I know how annoying this can be. It’s why I’ve explained to my kids that they can smoke, drink and push old ladies into boating lakes. But if they steal a song or a film, I will make them live in the chicken run for a year.

Sadly, I’m alone. Your kids are nicking things on an industrial scale. They have been brought up to expect everything for nothing on the web and they simply cannot understand why they should use money they need for mobile phone calls to pay for something that is available free.

I do not think there is a solution to this. Companies can build in as many electronic safeguards as they like but the fact is this: somewhere out there in cyberland there is a geek who can pick his way through the electronic locks and steal the booty.

The debate, then, is not whether the BBC should be allowed to peddle its warnings of global doom on the internet. It’s how you control a monster that seemingly cannot be controlled at all.

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