This article uses the example of the recent (ill-fated) experiment in the creation of a global education product--the UKeU--to explore how the concept of community in learning changes in this context. It uses a framework borrowed from the literature on changes in the welfare state to explain how the new economies of on line education distort the traditional ideas of learning communities. The article argues that ignoring the underpinning structural and economic institutions in the global economy (or assuming that they will somehow be overcome) is naive, and runs the risks of allowing the more extreme forms of the 'new' economic model of networked learning to colonise discourses of democracy and student-centredness.