Republican Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado fears congressional hearings with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg could lead to further government regulation of the internet.

Gardner thinks politicians will take advantage of the Facebook situation and use it as a way of increasing their power over a free and open internet.

“I think it treads on some very tenuous ground,” Gardner said on “America’s Newsroom” Tuesday. “There may be some people who wish to look at the opportunity to have regulation of the internet. Regulation over speech. Regulation over content. I’m very concerned about that and I think that’s the alarming part about the direction that questions could take this afternoon.”

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“Maybe they’ll want to get into campaign finance issues, maybe they’ll want to go into free speech issues,” he continued. “Are they going to try to create some kind of a government filter where it determines who can say what on what kind of a platform?”

“Let’s make sure that users’ privacy are protected. Let’s make sure Facebook is doing what they promised they would do. Let’s make sure there is room for competition against Facebook,” Gardner concluded.

“I don’t think what we want, as an outcome of this hearing, is regulation of the internet. Which has been a very incredible free and open voice of democracy around the globe.”

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