San Francisco  - Google has approached major internet service providers in the US with plans for its own fast lane that would send its traffic to users at higher speeds than other internet content, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

The proposal would appear to violate the widely accepted principle of net neutrality whereby the operators and owners of the network treat all traffic the same. Large network providers have long lobbied for the ability to charge companies for providing higher speed for their web traffic, but were bitterly opposed by Google and other large web companies like Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google on Monday denied that its new plan violated the principles of net neutrality. Rather it is based on the positioning of "edge servers" at high traffic points to aid the transmission of popular content like YouTube videos from local servers rather than from Google's central servers.

Such an approach is already widely used by other companies such as Akamai Technologies and would not violate the principle of net neutrality, Richard Whitt, Google's Washington-based telecom and media counsel, wrote in a blog post early Monday.

"Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the internet free and open," Whitt wrote.

The Federal Communications Commission, which supervises the internet backbone, is a strong supporter of net neutrality and earlier this year fined cable internet provider Comcast for slowing down some peer to peer traffic.

Internet service providers say that content owners should have to pay to help transmit popular content to help them keep up with the investments needed to power the internet as traffic increases by 50 per cent a year, now largely due to the expansive growth of bandwidth-hogging online video.

Critics of such plans argue that it would allow large companies to further dominate the internet by paying hefty fees to ensure that their web traffic flows fastest. Smaller companies who could not pay such fees would be at a disadvantage. (dpa)