CBC News writes that Google, one of the staunchest supporters of net neutrality, is under fire after a report in the Wall Street Journal suggested the search company was backing out of supporting an open and equal internet.

Citing internal Google documents, the newspaper on Sunday said the search engine company was quietly negotiating with large phone and cable companies to speed up the services it delivers. The arrangement, internally called OpenEdge, would see Google place its servers directly within the networks of internet service providers, which would let end users load YouTube videos and other content from the company faster.

The deal would establish a two-tiered system that would give Google’s traffic preferential treatment over other internet content, the newspaper said.

One major cable company involved in the talks said it had been reluctant to strike a deal with Google because a two-tiered system would violate U.S. net neutrality principles that discourage internet service providers from interfering with traffic.

“If we did this, Washington would be on fire,” an unnamed company executive told the newspaper.

In a Monday blog post, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel Richard Whitt admitted the company was negotiating with internet service providers to speed up its content, but disputed the “hyperbolic tone and confused claims” of the Wall Street Journal story.

“I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: 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,” he said.

Whitt said Google’s deal would be non-exclusive, which means that any other internet content provider — Yahoo or Microsoft, for example — could make the same arrangement.

“Google has offered to ‘co-locate’ caching servers within broadband providers’ own facilities; this reduces the provider’s bandwidth costs since the same video wouldn’t have to be transmitted multiple times,” Whitt said. “We’ve always said that broadband providers can engage in activities like co-location and caching, so long as they do so on a non-discriminatory basis.”

The newspaper also said some net neutrality supporters, including president-elect Barack Obama, have been changing or softening their views. Obama’s net neutrality plans are “much less specific than they were before,” the Journal quoted Whitt as saying.

Whitt, however, said he was misquoted.

The rest of the CBC News article is here.

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