Aug. 22, 2026
I am submitting this public comment on File No. S7-2026-25, Electronic Delivery of Information Under the Federal Securities Laws. The proposed Regulation E-Delivery requires a statement of availability to identify the covered entity and the type of covered information, provide a direct website address to the covered information, and warn that information available on the website may later be superseded by subsequent versions. Those protections improve usability, but they appear to leave a historical-delivery gap: the statement of availability is not required to identify or remain bound to the exact version/state of the covered information that satisfied the delivery obligation at the time the statement was sent. That matters because an electronic notice can outlive the web content it originally pointed to. If the same URL later resolves to an amended, corrected, or superseding disclosure, a recipient, auditor, court, or regulator reviewing the old notice may be unable to determine what information was actually furnished on the original delivery date. Requested resolution: require each statement of availability to be durably associated with the specific state/version of covered information that it delivered. A technology-neutral implementation could require: an effective/as-of date, filing identifier, revision identifier, content digest, or other immutable identifier sufficient to distinguish materially different versions of the covered information; the website address in the original statement to continue resolving to that exact delivered version for the applicable availability/retention period, rather than silently resolving to a mutable "latest" version; when a document is corrected, amended, or superseded, clear lineage identifying the newer version and the relationship to the prior version without erasing the earlier delivered state during its required retention period; and where a substantive new version itself must be delivered, a new statement of availability or other delivery event tied to that version. Suggested conformance tests: Send a statement of availability for Version A, then publish Version B at the same public-facing location. Re-open the original statement later. It should still identify and allow access to Version A for the required period, while clearly indicating that Version B superseded it. Correct an error in a delivered disclosure. The system should preserve which version was originally delivered, the correction date, and the corrected version rather than silently replacing the historical record. Request a paper copy during the permitted request period using an old statement of availability. The entity should be able to determine which version the recipient was originally entitled to receive and distinguish it from the current version. Audit a delivery months later using only the statement of availability and retained records. An independent reviewer should be able to reconstruct the exact disclosure state that satisfied the original delivery requirement. This need not mandate a particular file-naming scheme, storage architecture, blockchain, or hashing algorithm. The rule can remain technology-neutral while requiring the evidentiary result: electronic delivery should be reproducible as of the delivery event. The proposal already recognizes that online information can be superseded. Binding the notice to the delivered version would turn that warning into an auditable protection and prevent a mutable hyperlink from rewriting the historical record of what an investor actually received.