One Man's Quest to Make Information Free

Carl Malamud once told a senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission that he wanted to put the agency’s filings online. “I just don’t think people who use the Internet are going to be interested in this stuff,” Malamud remembers the official saying in 1993. Malamud bought all the filings and put them online anyway, using a computer borrowed from his friend Eric Schmidt. (Yes, that Eric Schmidt.) About a year later, he took them down. That prompted more than 17,000 day traders, investment clubs, and business school professors to beg the agency for free Web access to its records. You might know it today as the SEC’s “Edgar” database.

More than 15 years after that stunt, Malamud is still making the same argument: If you make government information free and easily accessible, there’s no telling who’ll start using it or what good ideas will spring up. “Every time I put something online there’s a huge audience,” says Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit that advocates for government transparency. “The industry guys think the only audience is industry types and Ralph Nader.”