There’s been plenty of buzz this week about Facebook’s reported “censoring” of conservative news and sites in their trending news section. And apparently that buzz has reached Capitol Hill.

On Tuesday the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, requesting answers to some questions regarding the trending news on their trending news section. Depending on who you ask it might be a bit overkill, but perhaps it’s getting at a larger question that’s been on the horizon for years: How do the concepts of “open internet” apply to websites?

Facebook launched their “trending news” project in January 2014, hiring on journalists to be the official “news curators.” Since then, users of the site would see a sidebar on their home page, displaying trending topics and news stories that Facebook was reportedly trending. Gizmodo ran a profile last week of how the project came about, but saved a bigger bomb for a post that ran Monday morning.

In it, former (unnamed) Facebook workers claimed that the curators routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers in the trending section, artificially injected selected stories into the module (even if they weren’t popular enough organically), and even blacklisting topics altogether. News covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) would only make the trending cut if more mainstream sites (like The New York Times or BBC) were also covering the story.

The list supplied to Gizmodo included things like “former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder.”

“I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” one former curator anonymously told Gizmodo. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”

Headlines buzzed—the topic even began trending on Facebook. Though reports say they were never told explicitly to avoid these outlets (or competing social media companies like Twitter) people weren’t happy at the idea of their Facebook feed being an artificial experience of the news out there. In a heated election year, conservative users were suddenly—and rightfully—worried about the validity of the access Facebook was serving them.

Which is how the Senate has gotten itself involved. Their letter to Zuckerberg asks a number of questions about Facebook’s methods, policies, and guidelines towards establishing trending content, as well as asking the company to “arrange for your staff including employees responsible for trending topics to brief committee staff on this issue.”

“Any attempt by a neutral and inclusive social media platform to censor or manipulate political discussion is an abuse of trust and inconsistent with the values of an open Internet,” Senator John Thune, leader of the committee, told Politico.

Now, the face of this is a bit thin. Conservatives in the Senate are now investigating (or at least perusing into) Facebook’s trending topics, all while not meeting with a Supreme Court nominee. Not to mention the fact that Facebook is a private company, and—although it may not be good business sense if it wants to achieve Zuckerberg’s dreams of the site as a utility—they have the First Amendment right to publish what they want. And just like any newsroom, what the site decides to publish is dictated by the editorial values of the workers it hires. Even the original Gizmodo article makes note of this.  

Photo Credit: ansik cc
Photo Credit: ansik cc

But the idea that a major internet company through which we access our data and news as a gatekeeper with its own agenda does fly in the face of the principles of open internet. The fact that Senator Thune name checks that in his quote to Politico is no coincidence. Especially since, as Vox points out, the back half of the 20th century saw the FCC establishing a lot of guidelines to avoid any one company exerting too much control over the news—the difference was, back then it meant reining in a means of distributing content:

These rules existed because regulators believed it was dangerous for any single company to exercise too much influence over the national political conversation. By carefully limiting media consolidation, the FCC hoped to provide room for a diversity of voices to be heard.

But in the past couple of decades, this approach has fallen out of favor. Conservative policy experts have argued that the proliferation of media organizations has made it unnecessary for the government to micromanage the structure of the media sector.

“Americans are in no danger of seeing their news and information monopolized, least of all by newspapers,” wrote the Heritage Foundation’s James Gattuso in 2008, arguing to liberalize the broadcast-newspaper cross-ownership rule. “Rather than increased concentration, recent decades have brought an historic expansion of information sources and their diversity.”

And conservatives have largely won this argument. Today, cable television networks and the internet are much more lightly regulated than the broadcast media giants of yesteryear.

But now we’re seeing companies like Facebook pull in a billion users a day, which is a wider reach than any 20th century news outlet had. Even if consumers aren’t engaging with all of Facebook’s content, that’s a lot of eyeballs passing over the news the social media site wants them to.

Facebook is not the first nor the latest company to blur the line between “business” and “personal,” but it’s a powerful one (again: One seventh of the world’s population turns to the site on a daily basis). Though a congressional briefing might be a bit much, it’s not outlandish for conservatives—or anyone—to start thinking about how the principles of open internet apply to the sites that helped the public fight for them.