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.”

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