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Book Review
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom: In this thought-provoking book, the author describes how patterns of information, knowledge and cultural production are changing. Benkler describes how the networked economy is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is a comprehensive, informative and challenging meditation on the rise of the “networked information economy” and its implications on society, politics and culture. Benkler, the Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Harvard Law School, is a leading authority on the law, economics and politics of networks, innovation, intellectual property and the Internet and he puts his wide knowledge and deep understanding to good use. He argues that the digital revolution is more revolutionary than has been recognised,
even by its most passionate defenders. The new information and communication technologies do not simply make the old way of doing things more efficient, but also supports fundamentally new ways of doing things. In particular, the past few years have seen the rise of social production, a radically decentralised, distributed mode of interaction that Benkler calls “commonsbased peer production.” Further, the book deals with the economics of the networked information economy. Benkler proposes social production as an alternative to the traditional organisational modes of market and hierarchy. This part is followed by “The Political Economy of Property and Commons”, which is the book’s most original section. Benkler sees social production as a powerful force for individual liberty. People used to be passive recipients of news, information, norms and culture; now they are active creators. Benkler strongly opposes privatising the information commons by allowing owners to exercise property rights. To ensure open access to the networked economy, Benkler favors a public-ownership
network infrastructure, loose enforcement of intellectual property rights, subsidised R&D, and “strategic regulatory interventions to negate monopoly control over essential resources in the digital environment”. The book concludes with a section on public policy, summarising Benkler’s concerns about privatising the digital commons—what he calls a “second enclosure movement” and outlining a positive role for the state, whose most important job, he argues, is to maintain openness or “neutrality” within the economy’s digital infrastructure. Author: Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Since the 1990s he has played a part in characterising the role of information commons and decentralised collaboration to innovation, information production and freedom in the networked economy and society. Published: New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. Pages: Pp. xii, 515. Sterlite Technologies Limited 151