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From: Eero Pikat
For the exchanges, market data has become a very substantial source of revenue and profit. For ICE, this has always been especially true, even prior to its acquisition of the New York Stock Exchange. The exchanges view Market Data as “theirs” and their “intellectual property”, even though they do nothing to create this data (the market participants do), and the exchanges simply report facts (trades). The ICE argument that recipients of multicast data increase their costs simply makes no technical sense. Subvendors, such as PICO, alleviate the load and technical resources that ICE would otherwise have to support. Technically, ICE has less work to do, and less resources to use, as customers leave “direct” connections to SFTI, and go to “indirect” vendors such as PICO. ICE’s proposal offers no evidence to support its claim that its costs are higher to support the customers of subvendors. To argue that adding this fee is not anti-competitive ignores that these fees are assigned only to vendors’ customers who buy data from ICE’s competitors. By definition, this is an anti-competitive move. In summary, we believe that these fees are introduced solely for the purpose of protecting market data revenue, either by augmenting lost revenue from SFTI, or discouraging current customers from leaving or discouraging new customers from going to outside vendors other than SFTI. The ICE proposal merely states, without evidence, that their costs are increasing, whereas logic would dictate the opposite. Further, these fees are pure inventions, out of pure air, that would be in addition to vendor / subvendor fees, as well as an already existing direct and indirect vendor fee. We strongly oppose these fees on the basis of a.) they are not supported technically, b.) they are anti-competitive, and c.) they are merely an attempt to increase revenues and profits. |