The race to become chairman of Ofcom will be rerun after Facebook and Google lobbied to stop the former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre getting the job, The Telegraph can reveal.

The culture secretary Oliver Dowden on Wednesday wrote to Peter Riddell the Public Appointments commissioner, saying he wants the process to start “afresh” with a new selection panel for the ￡142,500-a-year role - one of the most influential in the British media industry.

Mr Dowden is understood to have decided that the process has been deficient in some areas and civil servants have told him that there are grounds to rerun it. A major concern was “very heavy lobbying” against the candidature of Mr Dacre from major technology companies, including the Facebook operation headed by the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Nick Clegg.

The decision to scrap the process and start again is likely to stoke speculation that the panel of four Whitehall and business figures appointed to assess candidates may have advised Mr Dowden that Mr Dacre was not appointable.

The panel was chaired by Susannah Storey, a senior civil servant in Mr Dowden’s department, and included the newspaper executive Paul Potts; the former BT chief executive Lord Livingston; and Melanie Richards, the deputy chairman of the accountant KPMG.

Ministers were concerned some candidates were being “marked down” for saying they would provide “strong challenge” to Ofcom’s executives and saw their job as reforming the regulator.

The process had favoured “those who would slot in comfortably within the current system and not rock the boat”, one insider said, when ministers want a strong independently-minded chairman.

Sources close to the process said that in an interview with the panel last month Mr Dacre questioned Ofcom’s ties to the BBC, such as via its then-board member Tim Suter. A former BBC News executive, he resigned from the regulator last week after he was criticised in Lord Dyson's report into the Martin Bashir scandal.

A source also added that Mr Dacre is said to have raised concerns about the BBC’s financial management, which were last week echoed by a Public Accounts Committee report which labelled the corporation “complacent” having “ducked the hard choices” as viewing and listening shifts online.

While a longstanding critic of the BBC, he has said it is a “ a great civilising force” and that he would pay the licence fee for Radio 4 alone. But it is Mr Dacre’s criticism of tech giants that prompted the most vociferous campaign against him.

One source said the tech companies’ concerns had been raised “several times” at meetings with officials. The Fleet Street veteran, 72, has been a longstanding opponent of the power of Silicon Valley and has called for Google and Facebook to be broken up. At Ofcom he aimed to use new powers under forthcoming “online harms” to hold them to account for carrying for child sexual abuse images, terrorist material and suicide content.