The Europeans certainly take antitrust laws a good deal more seriously than the Americans. Oracle and Sun Microsystems are learning this the hard way, as Microsoft did before them.
Now, consider Thomson Reuters. Surely, the media and information giant has competitors, like the company named for the guy who just bought himself a third term as New York’s mayor. Still, the European Commission has opened an investigation into potentially anticompetitive practices on the part of the company.
It seems that the EC doesn’t much like that Thomson Reuters doesn’t allow its proprietary Reuters Instrument Codes–which identify securities for banking and trading software–to be mapped to other companies’ proprietary codes, which do the same thing. And, the EC says in a statement, “without the possibility of such mapping, customers may potentially be ‘locked’-in to working with Thomson Reuters because replacing RICs by reconfiguring or by rewriting their software applications can be a long and costly procedure.”
Antitrust
Given that “Too Big To Fail” has become the catchphrase of the financial crisis, is it any surprise that antitrust has become a particular fascination of enforcement? Of course not.
The U.S. government plans to reverse its antitrust policy and put more pressure on companies eyeing bigger market share through their dominance, the New York Times reported on its website.
Christine Varney, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division, will announce the policy reversal in a speech on Monday at the Center for American Progress, the paper said, citing people who she consulted about the policy shift.
The changed policy will be a reversal from that of the Bush administration, during which not a single case against a dominant firm was lodged for violating the antimonopoly law, the paper said.
One of the assumptions that underlies the post-crisis world is that a wave of consolidation would be one of the end games that cleans up the broken eggs left behind. It will be interesting to see how the rubber of the new anti-merger philosophy meets the road.
U.S. to make antitrust policy tougher: report [Reuters]
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