During a speech on March 8th, at the European Competition and Consumer Day in Copenhagen, European Union Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia announced that the Commission had opened an anti-trust investigation into Thomson Reuters. A press release contains his full speech, but this is the part that mentions Thomson Reuters:

” … we have launched an antitrust investigation in the Thomson Reuters case, involving one of the major financial information providers. We want to make sure that undue restrictions on the provision of financial information do not hamper the healthy development of financial services.”
…
“We have concerns that Thomson Reuters has potentially abused a dominant market position by restricting the usage of its identification codes RICs (Reuters Instrument Codes), thereby limiting the ability of its customers to switch to competing data providers.”

This is of concern, not just in Europe, but for online researchers worldwide. Most notably, Factiva removed all RIC codes from its database in December 2011. The RIC codes were originally implemented in Factiva when it was a joint venture between Reuters and Dow Jones. Now that it’s owned solely by Dow Jones and Reuters became part of Thomson, Factiva had to ditch the RIC codes, which is a great shame, as it eliminates an important access point for searching for company information.