EU opens anti-trust investigation into Thomson Reuters

The European Commission (EC) Tuesday opened an anti-trust investigation into Thomson Reuters, a Canadian news and financial data company, to see whether the company abuses its dominant market position.

The EC said in a press release that the investigation will particularly focus on whether customers or competitors were prevented from translating Reuters Instrument Codes (RICs) used by Thomson Reuters to alternative identification codes of other data feed suppliers, so-called "mapping," to the detriment of competition.

"Without the possibility of such mapping, consumers may be constrained to work with Thomson Reuters because replacing RICs by reconfiguring or by rewriting their software applications can be long and costly," the EC said.

RICs are short, alphanumerical codes that identify securities and their trading locations, which are used to retrieve information from Thomson Reuters' real-time data feeds, for example real-time information on stock prices at a certain exchange.

The EC said it has opened the investigation on its own initiative, stressing the company's rights of defense will be fully respected.

Source:Xinhua