Privacy, Business and Law

On October 14, Australia’s AFR Net Services reported that repeated outages at Australian e-brokers are beginning to “try the patience of professional traders”. According to the report, the previous week customers of Sanford Securities Ltd. online brokerage service “received repeated e-mails from the company, pleading for patience as if beefed up its computing power.” Likewise, Commonwealth Securities suffered an outage in July “caused by a router failure at internet provider, UUNET.” Such outages, of course, are not limited to Australia. U.S. e-brokers have suffered such outages and have found themselves the subject of scrutiny by federal regulators, legislative committees and at least one state attorney general’s office. See Blake A. Bell, Online Brokerages Under Siege for Trading Outages and Delays, 2(11) wallstreetlawyer.com 10 (Glasser LegalWorks Apr. 1999) <http://www.simpsonthacher.com/memos/art010.htm>.