WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — The Federal Reserve on Friday moved to tighten its lockup procedures, responding to criticism of how the central bank releases its market-moving interest-rate statements to the public.

The new procedures will require media outlets including MarketWatch as well as Bloomberg News, Reuters and others to report from the central bank, where it will cut off access to the Internet until the 2 p.m. Eastern release time.

Previously, the Fed gave the option of filing reports from the central bank or the U.S. Treasury, and relied on an honor system to ensure media outlets didn’t disseminate the information early.

The Fed lets a limited number of accredited media outlets receive statements ahead of the embargo. This practice will continue under the new setup.

The Fed move comes after the research firm Nanex pointed out that at the September Federal Open Market Committee, where the central bank surprised the market by announcing that it wouldn't taper its bond-buying program, there were trades made right at the time of the announcement.

The firm pointed out that would require the news to be preloaded onto servers in New York or Chicago — or for there to be insider trading.

“Starting with the Oct. 30 FOMC statement, our media release security procedures will be enhanced to include additional control. We can consulted with news organizations and we believe these additional measures will protect against premature release while still allowing news organizations an opportunity to accurately report the FOMC’s actions at the release time,” a Fed spokesman said in a statement.

The Fed’s lockup rules had always concentrated on making sure news didn’t get out before the end of the embargo, and the central bank hasn't taken any disciplinary action against any media outlet.

As a practical matter, by switching the Internet off until the embargo time, it should be impossible to preload any of the news onto a server outside of Washington.

Whether the new system will be any fairer to retail customers remains to be seen. Firms will still be getting near-instantaneous so-called algorithmic feeds from some news outlets to execute trades by machine.