The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006.

[3] Benkler describes the current epoch as a "moment of opportunity" due to the emergence of what he terms the Networked Information Economy (NIE), a "technological-economic feasibility space"[4] that is the result of the means of producing media becoming more socially accessible.

He traces the emergence and development of various communications (radio, newspapers, television) through the 19th and 20th centuries as functions of increasingly centralized control due to the high cost factor of production, and believes that media was thus produced on an industrial scale.

To Benkler, this is due to a new feasibility space: lowered costs of access via digital production and radical decentralization rather than centralized messaging ("coordinate coexistence", 30).

Benkler details some of the key components of this new economy based not on financial remuneration but on user-involvement, accreditation, and tools that promote collaboration between individuals.

He examines the historical emergence of the mass media, looking at the relationship between print and radio and ever-broadening, industrial broadcast models of production which became supported by advertising.

He introduces the idea of the networked-individual who govern their own interactions and microcommunity roles in both real and virtual space and dynamically switch between when needed, eventually concluding that the early views were nostalgic and somewhat fatuous.

Vaidhyanathan states: Benkler addressed this criticism in his response to Vaidhyanathan's review, conceding that perhaps more attention to the physical elements of the networked information economy could have been given: In a review of the book by Ben Peters, a similar sentiment to Vaidhyanathan's criticism is expressed: “It may also do very well to account for massive information infrastructure costs, the fiber optic cables, the wifi, and the laptops that the Benkler's optimism depends upon in the international development scene.”[40] In The Independent Review: A Journal of Political Economy, Peter G. Klein stated: Derek Belt, who reviewed the book on his blog titled “Dreaming in Digital”, targeted Benkler's optimism as his main point of criticism, suggesting that Benkler's optimism was too rooted in what was possible in the future, neglecting to take into consideration the position in which we as a society find ourselves in at the present time in relation to information policy.

David M. Berry contends that Benkler's work builds on "a rather shaky binary distinction between proprietary industrial forms of economic and technological structure and non-proprietary peer-production models".

According to Berry, Benkler fails to recognize that should network forms of organization happen to be wealth generating, "they will be co-opted into mainstream ‘industrial’ ways of production.

"[43] Johan Söderberg links Benkler's optimism towards networked modes of production to a larger current of thought generated by the hacker community.

As Siva Vaidhyanathan stated in the opening of his review, “there is no better place to turn for an account of the processes of creativity and commerce relating to digital networks and the work that people do with them.”[39] More specifically, The Wealth of Networks is also hailed as an incredibly important piece of writing for those advocating for greater protection of the cultural commons and open access models on the Internet.