Nonrepudiable Content
James Snell offers some practicalities in the Interactive Data Initiative at the SEC.
A company publishes a digitally signed Atom feed on their own site and through some process files the report with the SEC. The SEC republishes the feed on their site and includes their own digital signature that covers both the SEC published feed and the feed published by the company. If the company feed changes, the SEC’s signature gets broken.
This seems like a workable solution. What I object to is relying on polling, rather than asking the company to submit their filings to a regulator, and getting the regulator to sign off on them. My other objection is placing other parties in the position of being notaries or escrow services - this is a job that properly belongs to a regulatory agency.
Incidentally, I remember an incident in 2000 (just prior to the crash) involving Emulex (NYSE:ELX) where a former employee of a wire service shorted Emulex stock, and then published a bogus press release warning of financial troubles at Emulex, using his former employer's service to disseminate the release. Emulex stock suffered a huge hit and a number of investors lost large sums of money. So I'm not suggesting wire services are a perfect mechanism for disseminating information.