TRANSPARENT MARKETS REQUIRE TRANSPARENT INFORMATION

After running the EDGAR and Patent databases for well over a year, we decided that this situation wasn't scaling. We could have brought in new grants, corporate donations, or charged fees to keep the system going. Or, we could have spun the system off to a corporation or entrepreneur, many of whom were starting to get .com fever. But, the whole point of the exercise was to have the SEC and Patent Office run their own systems.

In August, 1995, we decided to take action. We posted a note that the service would terminate in 60 days and encouraged people to let the SEC and others know if they felt that having EDGAR on-line was essential part of making our public markets public. There was a bit of a public circus, and the next thing we knew we threw a spare Sun server in a station wagon, drove it down to the SEC, and they were up and running.

The Patent office made a token concession by offering a database of patent abstracts on the net, but fought tooth and nail against releasing the full text, a move they said would destroy a significant revenue stream. (A few years later, we managed to counteract that argument with a little guerilla database work.) The SEC chairman and commissioners, by contrast, studied the issue carefully and decided that public information was the key to transparent markets.

URL: http://museum.media.org/edgar/
URL: http://www.sec.gov/