It is a basic principle of the internet that all content travelling over the network is treated equally – from pirated songs to programmes made and delivered by the BBC.

However, Google wants to change that by speeding up the delivery of popular content, such as YouTube videos featuring The X Factor winner Alexandra Burke, by storing content in facilities owned by internet providers.

Its plans prompted concerns that Google is abandoning the principle known as “net neutrality” by treating popular content differently – a claim that the world’s dominant search engine denies.

Richard Whitt, Google’s principal lawyer in Washington, said that criticism of its plans was “based on a misunderstanding of the way in which the open internet works”, and reiterated the company’s belief in net neutrality.

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Google is in talks with internet providers in the United States, and potentially elsewhere, about what it calls “edge caching”, where sought-after content is located nearer to where users are downloading it, thereby speeding up loading times.

That would allow, for example, a Californian website with an exclusive video about a British celebrity to be served to surfers from Brighton to Bangor more quickly because a copy or cache of the video would be stored on computer servers in London.

Google says that edge caching is intended to make the internet run more efficiently and says that it wants to offer to locate Google servers on facilities owned by internet providers “on a nondiscriminatory basis”. However, it has raised fears that it amounts to a form of favouritism.

Internet providers in the US and UK have argued that they should be allowed to prioritise certain types of traffic – particularly video – if the content producer is willing to pay more for a fast-lane service. Those unwilling to pay would be left in the slow lane.

A BT spokesman said it was “only fair and sensible” that “network owners must be allowed flexibility in how they charge”. Virgin Media described the idea of “express lane delivery” as “interesting, albeit hypothetical”.

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