This is interesting – according to PC World, The Tribune is now blaming Google for the cock-up that sent United Airline shares into freefall on Monday (see our original cover here). It opens a fascinating can of worms – when there is a momentous cock up like this, when someone acts on information found on Google, and passes it on so that others trade on it, as here – who is responsible? The original content provider (the Tribune in this case). the Aggregator (Google), the Actor (the analyst who put it up on Bloomberg) or the Agents (the people and devices that actually carried out the trade. The issue in a nutshell is that the original story was from 2002, Google picked it up as 7 Sep 2008, and all hell broke loose thereafter

What are the implications if responsibility is borne by:

(i) The content creator – the implications then are that you are instantly responsible for whatever stupid/dangerous/etc things other people do with your content (clearly an argument that young Mr Blodget at SAI would love to espouse ). Lets be clear here – the Tribune’s data was not wrong, it was just not datestamped in a way Google could find. Imagine if something you wrote was found to have some omission 6 years later, but you were liable because some eejit had acted on it without checking context. The litigation implications of that would bring the entire content market to a halt. Not an entirely bad idea given some of the crap published, but all in all this is not the desired outcome.

(ii) The Aggregator – if they are responsible for at least partly checking their sources’ accuracy, then that forces the “New Aggregators” to adopt more of the responsibilities of the Old Media – fact checking, editing etc. But it also screws up the use – and economics – of automated aggregation. It also places a huge risk on them, so they are likely to drop any but the most trusted sources, thus stopping the entire UGC and new media world in its tracks. And in this case it was Google that redated the article, thus leading to the downstream errors.

(iii) The Actor – the person/organisation who actually took the content and put it in a position where it could do the damage? This would force organs that can influence behaviour to be far more careful about what they write and say (this is the way the Old World Media worked, as Mr Blodget knows only too well )

(iv) The Agents – those that took the data and acted on it – in this case a combination of traders and computers, and its probably arguable which ones are more capable of exercising judgement. Lets not forget these are the people who actually did it. Absolving them is risky, as it allows the “I only shot him because they told me it was OK”excuse to be trotted out.

It seems clear to us that the Agent and Actors should bear the brunt here, not just on mea culpability grounds, but if only because the risks of doing anything else is very high, both on the media value chain’s future and on covering the apportioned risk. There is probably also a requirement for content providers and aggregation engines to get certain key metric data right, or to highlight if they don’t have it. What is more interesting is the attempts by quite a few parties to place blame on the original content provider.

But we all know the answer – yes, the Telcos are to blame, because they carried it on their pipes and without them none of this would have happened