A new IFLA Statement, produced as an addendum to our 2016 Statement on Net Neutrality, highlights the risks to libraries of efforts to oblige anyone making content available over the internet to pay telecommunications companies supplementary fees to do so.

Almost ten years ago, IFLA released its Statement on Net Neutrality and Zero Rating, underlining concerns about how restricting and/or requiring payments for flows of information over the internet, beyond normal connection fees, could threaten the freedom of access to information.

As we argued, such provisions would tend to benefit the largest and wealthiest players – those best able to pay any fees or negotiate better deals with telecommunications companies.

In recent years, we have seen a new form of violation of net neutrality emerge – the idea of ‘network usage fees’. These are requested by telecommunications companies, claiming that they need additional funding in order to be able to provide the infrastructure to carry increasing volumes of data over the internet.

However, these raise exactly the same concerns as ten years ago. Imposing fees will benefit those best able to pay them – typically big commercial operators – and hurt smaller and non-commercial players.

In broad terms, this risks a world where freedom of access to information is distorted in favour of these larger actors.

More specifically, this raises questions for digital libraries or repositories which have a specific mission to provide access to large collections over the internet. Typically, these do not operate on large budgets, and so new costs could be highly damaging.

The new IFLA Statement, prepared by the Advisory Committee on Freedom of Access to Information and Freedom of Expression, underlines these concerns, and recommends that governments should resist calls for network usage fees, and rather look for less damaging ways of supporting infrastructure development, in consultation with library associations and others.

It also recommends that library associations monitor legislative and regulatory developments as far as possible, including in collaboration with IFLA.