Accountability?

For those who haven’t been watching, there’s been a nasty little dust-up between Rob Scoble and The Register, an online technology-review publication. The Reg accused Microsoft, in an IE beta, of some anti-competitive nasties (to be fair, of exactly the kind that Microsoft has done before). Scoble hotly denied it, saying the problem was rare, he hadn’t seen it and, when it occurred, was a bug not a strategy. He had plausible-sounding support from the IE team. The Reg returned to the attack, specifically alleging that Scoble had experienced the problem and was doing a cover-up, and published an email with Scoble’s name on the “From:” line as evidence. Scoble apparently alleges the email is a fake, and has been slinging words like “libel” around. Since then, the Register has been silent, which is really troubling; they need to affirm that they stand by their story, or back down. Either Scoble was lying, or he wasn’t; either the Register was off the rails or it wasn’t. I’m not linking to the individual pieces, because this hasn’t anything to do with the Reg’s initial allegation. It’s about finding out who’s lying, and if there are any penalties for it.