The communications minister, Ed Vaizey, has insisted to the Guardian that he is in favour of net neutrality, and that his speech on the subject has been misinterpreted.

Ed Vaizey, who last week gave a speech on the internet and regulation (PDF) to an FT conference, told the Guardian that "I say 'don't block input' [to the internet]. It's my first principle." He added that he thought people who criticise him for abandoning net neutrality haven't read his speech: "I say the same as Berners-Lee."

However Berners-Lee was less sure when the Guardian asked him. "There's no passage in [Vaizey's] speech where he says he's against net neutrality," he said. "We have discussed it on the phone. But I can't say yet that we're entirely in line."

The passage in Vaizey's speech which sparked controversy last week, titled "The open internet", was titled "Net neutrality", and noted that discussions on the topic have "particular resonance" in the US because some areas have fewer choices of ISPs and "ISPs could have total control over which services and applications a consumer has access to, and could give preferential treatment to those they favour." Vaizey noted that there are different discussions on the topic in other countries, including Canada, Norway and the European Union.

In the key passage, he said: "Consumers should always have the ability to access any legal content or service. Content and service providers should have the ability to innovate and, most importantly, to reach end users ... This could include the evolution of a two-sided market where consumers and content providers could choose to pay for differing levels of quality of service."

The comments sparked a furore as his words were seen as allowing a two-tier internet in which companies would have to pay to get their content to arrive in timely fashion - a complaint that Erik Huggers of the BBC made last month over the corporation's iPlayer catchup service.

Berners-Lee, who has written at length on the web in the latest edition of Scientific American, previously set out his principles on net neutrality in a personal blog post in June 2006, in which he wrote that:

"Net neutrality is this: If I pay to connect to the net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level."

He continued:

"... net neutrality is not asking for the internet for free, or saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service... Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the internet, and, now, the society based on it."

The key difference is that Vaizey mentions content providers - where Berners-Lee does not. That subtle difference could leave space for ISPs to charge content providers.

When challenged on this, Vaizey insisted "but I say don't block input. It's my first principle."

Notably, Berners-Lee retweeted a link to a Guardian article in which the singer and entrepreneur Peter Gabriel insisted on the importance of net neutrality. But he told the Guardian afterwards that he had discussed the topic with Vaizey.

In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Vaizey reiterated that "My first and overriding priority is an open internet where consumers have access to all legal content. Should the internet develop in a way that was detrimental to consumer interests we would seek to intervene."

He added: "We're not saying one ISP should be able to prioritise one provider's content over another and I don't support the commercial decision to downgrade a rival's site."