This article proposes three complementary approaches for determining the originality of the virtual communities that develop on Internet: a historical approach, in order to specify the similarities and differences between online communities and the open fields and utopian communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; an economic approach, to clarify the role of communities in a non-rival economy (i.e. an economy where the value originates mainly from the generation of forms rather than from their industrial reproduction); an ethnographic approach, finally, in order to analyse the nature of the community ties. The latter approach rests neither on gift nor on altruism but, as in the case of the Kula system of the Trobriand islanders, on asynchronous exchange which structures a particular type of long-term relation, narrowly limited to the maintenance of a non-rival circulating corpus.