In anthropological studies of Indonesian communications media, a great deal of attention is given to how new media can give rise to new kinds of community, new forms of identity, and new forms of social conflict. Less attention is given to the ways in which media networks are themselves the sites of political and economic cooperation, conflict and contestation. While some scholars do address this kind of issue, they tend to do so primarily at the level of national or provincial politics and policy. This paper uses a number of cases to show that there is an important domain of ‘media politics’ in Indonesia that has been left out of the scholarly literature: the real politik of networks at the local level. Although  it is often not talked about in explicitly political terms, it is often in this domain that conflict over media is most heated and cooperation most intensive. A central aspect of this conflict concerns whether or not, and/or how, the advent of new media is used to extend the commodity form further into the realm of human communication. While for the most part, struggles over networks have been won by those who seek to profit from them, such victories have not been universal. The paper examines examples of communications networks where the ‘use value’ of communication has been emphasized over its ‘exchange value’.