• Financial Times, Friday, September 12, 2008 11:30 AM

As expected, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will launch an investigation into the precipitous drop of United Airlines' shares on Monday after a story from 2002 detailing the company's bankruptcy was republished on the Web site of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and then picked up and disseminated by Google News. This sent UAL Corp. stock down more than 75%. Trading was later halted after it emerged that the story was six years old, and that United had not filed for bankruptcy for a second time. Its stock has since recovered.

"Anytime anyone spreads false information about a public company over a communication medium like the Internet, its message boards, chat rooms or otherwise, that will raise questions as to whether someone is committing securities fraud," said John Reed Stark, head of the SEC's office of Internet enforcement.

Tribune Company, which owns the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and Google have blamed each other for the debacle, although the former has failed to identify the visitor whose lone visit to the 2002 Chicago Tribune story seemed to be enough to land a link to it on the Sun-Sentinel's most-viewed list at that hour. Google News then spotted and indexed the link as a new story when it could not find a 2002 dateline in the article. The newspaper giant maintains that it would have been obvious to a reader that the article was six years old.

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