Over the past couple of weeks, an interesting debate has unfolded around the SEC's proposed rule to increase investor protections in asset-backed securities. My friend and CLOUD colleague, Paul Wilkinson, forwarded the proposed rule to me while I was in Europe for the Health 2.0 conference in Paris, a trip from which I returned just two days prior to the volcano in Iceland spewing its ash into European airspace!

Following the Health 2.0 Conference on April 6 and 7 and meetings with the innovation leadership at SWIFT on April 8 in Brussels, my wife and I enjoyed some time with her family in Belgium before returning home.  It was during this time with family that an interesting conversation unfolded over a delicious lunch in the countryside west of Brussels that unexpectedly yielded some intriguing historical insights into language and access.

My wife's aunt lives in a beautiful old farmhouse that has been renovated several times over its life.  One of those renovations is a truly special library (populated with many, many antique books by her now deceased uncle and former justice on the Belgian Court of Appeals).

It was during lunch in the salon close to this library that one of my wife's other uncles told the story of another old collection of books in the city of Lille, which is now in France (Lille is only an hour or so from Brussels and used to be a part of Belgium.  Like the Alsace-Lorraine with Germany and France, it is one of the places that has gone back and forth in history.).  As my uncle told his story from Lille, I realized that in many ways it is the same challenge we have with languages on the Internet.

What struck me from his story was when he said the following, "many people in Belgium and France can not read the histories of the region because they are in Flemish and not French."  Think about that statement for a moment.

Without translations, there are stories that are completely missed by entire populations, because they are in a language that others do not use.  In modern terms, this is akin to Google's scanning of books into digital form. That undertaking is only a small portion of the ultimate benefit of the project.  Google needs to translate them, too. Because, if they are in a language that no one understands or no one uses, then it is as if they were never printed in the first place.

The history of books can inform us in the debate over ABS transparency, and my uncle, who has no knowledge of technology at all, may have hit the nail on the head with his story of the Flemish books in Lille.  If the disclosures are in a language no one uses, then it is as if the information was never disclosed in the first place.

Of course, language is only one piece of the equation.  Even before books and printing, language flourished, although it wasn't widely disseminated because the cost of distribution (i.e. scribes) was very high. The invention of the printing press didn't change language, but it did change the speed, volume and dissemination of information. More people could read because we suddenly lowered the cost of books through the use of technology. The printing press was a major achievement because it removed the human capital limitation of scribes on the amount of information available.

So, language and printing are both vital to the dissemination and access to information.  The SEC must, therefore, not only pick the right language but pick the right process to ensure that information is democratized and markets function.