November 5, 2008
I have three comments with regards to the Commission Guidance:
1. The use of a company website to publish information should not preclude the use of EDGAR as a secondary location of information. For the definition of Regulation FD, I do not feel it is necessary for the information to be simultaneously published to company website and submitted to EDGAR, but the information should be available through EDGAR within a reasonable amount of time. I appreciate the value of the EDGAR database and do not feel that publishing on a company website should be a substitute for also submitting a Form 8-K or other Forms.
2. With regards to the definition of "posted and accessible", a company's Investor Relations website may or may not be the same as the company website URL. Investors would be expected to find Investor Relations information from the company's main website URL. Therefore, I would encourage the Commission to require that links to Investor Relations information (and thus, to posted and accessible Regulation FD information) be located at the top of the company's main webpage. The complaint is that many sites this investor has visited have the Investor Relations link buried within the web page, or located only by scrolling to the bottom of the main web page. Again, often this link is only found by clicking first an "About Us" link.
3. In regards to the ability to print data presented using interactive web pages, I disagree with the Commission that these pages do not require a "printer-friendly standard". Given the amount of effort required to create interactive web page data, the ability to create a "report format" that is printer-friendly should not require significant additional programming and should be required. Since the creation of interactive data represents "publishing" this data, the ability to create hard-copy or "static" versions of this data in a printer-friendly format would avoid the possibility that data could be manipulated in a way that would change over time (resulting in complications to the interpretation of publishing vs republishing of data).
thank you for your consideration of these comments.