As trading becomes more automated and fragmented, the question of who controls essential price information is turning into a contest over economics, competition and market access.
Financial markets cannot function without information about prices, quotes, trades and available liquidity. Yet the information generated by exchanges and trading venues is also a commercial product. That creates a structural tension that has become harder to ignore as electronic markets have grown faster, more fragmented and more dependent on machine-readable data.
For an investor looking at a screen, a share price can appear almost like a public fact. For an institutional trading desk, however, the data needed to route an order efficiently may include real-time top-of-book quotations, depth-of-book information, auction imbalances, historical order-book data, low-latency feeds and direct connectivity. Each layer can have a different owner, licence, price and permitted use.
The resulting debate is not simply about whether exchanges charge too much. It is about a deeper question: when market data is both the output of a commercial venue and an input required for effective competition, where should proprietary rights end and market infrastructure obligations begin?
That question is becoming more important because regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are changing the architecture through which consolidated data is distributed, while exchanges continue to expand proprietary data products and investors increasingly rely on them for execution, analytics and risk management.
Market data has moved from by-product to strategic asset
Historically, exchanges were understood primarily as places where buyers and sellers met. In modern markets, that description is incomplete. Exchanges are transaction venues, technology platforms, clearing and connectivity providers, index businesses and data companies at the same time.
Every order, cancellation, quote and execution creates information. Once collected and structured, that information can be sold in multiple forms: live feeds, delayed feeds, historical data, reference data, derived analytics and specialised products for quantitative or machine-learning applications. The same underlying trading activity can therefore support several revenue streams.
This matters because market data revenues are often recurring and less directly tied to transaction volumes than execution fees. Cboe, for example, said in its first-quarter 2026 filing that Data Vantage revenue increased partly because of higher proprietary market-data fees and access and capacity fees. That is not unusual. Data and connectivity have become strategic businesses across major exchange groups.
Exchange-business example: Cboe Global Markets — Q1 2026 Form 10-Q.
Why ownership becomes complicated in fragmented markets
The legal answer to who owns a proprietary exchange feed may appear straightforward: the venue collects the information and licenses the resulting product. The economic answer is less simple because the value of the data depends on trading activity contributed by market participants, while those same participants may need the data to comply with best-execution duties and compete effectively.
Fragmentation intensifies the issue. When the same security trades across many venues, an institutional broker may need data from several exchanges to reconstruct the market accurately. A feed that appears optional in isolation can become functionally necessary when combined with routing obligations, latency-sensitive execution and customer expectations.
IOSCO has highlighted these tensions. Its 2022 report on market data in secondary equity markets described concerns raised by market participants over cost, accessibility, fairness and consolidation. Respondents disagreed over the appropriate pricing model: some argued for cost-based pricing plus a reasonable margin, while trading venues emphasised the commercial value delivered to users.
Further context: IOSCO — Market Data in the Secondary Equity Market: Current Issues and Considerations (2022).
The United States is testing the boundary between public and proprietary data
The U.S. equity market has long combined consolidated public feeds with faster or more detailed proprietary products sold by individual exchanges. Regulation NMS established mechanisms for collecting and disseminating core quotation and transaction information, while exchanges developed direct feeds that often offer richer depth or lower latency.
The SEC's Market Data Infrastructure framework sought to modernise this model by expanding the content of consolidated market data and introducing a more competitive structure for consolidation. The debate has continued as market structure itself evolves.
In June 2026, the SEC approved a fee schedule for the National Market System Plan Regarding Consolidated Equity Market Data. The same month, the Commission proposed broader changes to Regulation NMS and used its economic analysis to illustrate the scale of proprietary-data and connectivity costs faced by sophisticated firms.
In that proposal, the SEC estimated that purchasing depth-of-book market data from all exchanges could cost about $1.6 million a year, before taking account of every connectivity expense. It also cited examples of monthly non-display data fees reaching $22,400 and a 10-gigabit exchange connection costing $18,500 a month. These figures do not prove that every fee is excessive, but they demonstrate why market-data pricing has become an important competitive variable rather than a minor operating expense.
See: SEC — Market Data Infrastructure.
Current U.S. market-data plan activity: SEC — National Market System Plans Rulemaking.
Cost examples and market-structure analysis: SEC — 2026 proposed amendments to Regulation NMS.
Europe is moving toward a different model
Europe has approached the problem through a stronger emphasis on consolidated access and cost-based pricing principles. Under MiFIR, pre-trade and post-trade market data must be made available on a reasonable commercial basis, with fees linked to the cost of producing and disseminating the data plus a reasonable margin.
The framework became more concrete in 2026. ESMA withdrew its earlier market-data guidelines in February after new regulatory technical standards on reasonable commercial basis had entered into force. Existing providers were given a transition period that ran until 22 August 2026 to align contracts with the new rules.
More significantly, ESMA authorised EuroCTP in July 2026 as the consolidated tape provider for shares and ETFs. The service is intended to combine pre-trade and post-trade information from multiple contributors into a single stream. Retail investors, academics, civil-society organisations and regulators are expected to receive the data free of charge, while other users will have access for a reasonable fee.
The EU model does not abolish proprietary exchange data. Instead, it changes the competitive baseline by making a broader consolidated view available through a supervised infrastructure. If the tape becomes sufficiently useful, it could reduce the degree to which some users need to assemble fragmented feeds themselves.
EU pricing framework: ESMA — MiFIR Article 13, reasonable commercial basis.
2026 implementation update: ESMA — Simplifies MiFID II/MiFIR obligations on market data.
Equity consolidated tape: ESMA — EuroCTP authorisation, 27 July 2026.
A consolidated tape does not end the commercial battle
It would be easy to assume that a consolidated tape solves the ownership problem. In practice, it changes the battlefield rather than eliminating it. The most sophisticated trading firms may still want richer depth, lower latency, auction information, order-by-order data or direct connectivity that a consolidated service cannot replicate.
That creates a two-tier structure. One layer is designed to deliver broad market transparency at controlled cost. Another remains a commercial market for premium information that can support faster routing, deeper analytics and specialised strategies.
The key policy question is therefore not whether proprietary data should exist. It is whether the public or consolidated layer is sufficiently complete and timely that firms can participate effectively without being forced into every premium product.
The battle is also about licences, not just prices
Market-data economics extend beyond the headline subscription fee. Licences can distinguish between display and non-display use, internal and external distribution, terminals and servers, derived data, algorithmic use and redistribution to clients. Firms may also need to report usage, audit entitlements and manage vendor-of-record relationships.
This matters in an AI-heavy market environment. A firm training models on historical order-book data, generating derived signals from real-time feeds or embedding market information into client applications may create uses that traditional terminal-based licences were not designed to address.
As a result, the next phase of the market-data debate may focus less on whether a feed can be viewed and more on what users are allowed to do with it. The economic value of data increasingly comes from computation, transformation and reuse rather than simple display.
Why exchanges defend proprietary pricing
Exchange operators argue that market data products require expensive technology, resilient infrastructure, cybersecurity, distribution systems and continuous investment. They also contend that competition between venues and vendors can discipline pricing and encourage product innovation.
There is a legitimate economic point behind that position. If regulation pushes all data toward a narrow cost-recovery model, it could weaken incentives to develop specialised products or invest in distribution quality. Premium data can also serve very different users, from market makers requiring microsecond-level feeds to asset managers using end-of-day analytics.
The difficulty is that competition is imperfect when the product is unique. A venue's own order-book data cannot always be substituted with another venue's feed. If a broker needs information from a specific market to route orders intelligently, the data provider may possess pricing power that is not comparable with a normal software vendor.
Why investors and brokers push back
Data users tend to frame the issue around necessity and cumulative cost. A large broker may subscribe to dozens of feeds, pay exchange and vendor fees, maintain low-latency connectivity and build infrastructure to normalise data across venues. The marginal fee for one product can look small while the system-wide burden is substantial.
There is also a fairness concern. If only the largest firms can afford the most complete view of the market, data economics can reinforce scale advantages. That does not automatically create an unfair market—different firms have always invested different amounts in technology—but it raises questions when essential information becomes tightly linked to the ability to achieve competitive execution quality.
The debate therefore sits at the intersection of market efficiency and industrial organisation. Regulators are not only asking whether prices are reasonable. They are asking whether the structure of data access supports genuine competition among brokers, venues and investors.
What the next market-data model may look like
The emerging direction is likely to be hybrid rather than revolutionary. Core data will increasingly be treated as market infrastructure, with stronger governance, more standardisation and clearer pricing constraints. Proprietary data will remain a commercial product where it provides additional depth, speed or analytics beyond that baseline.
That model will place more emphasis on three questions: which data elements are essential for fair participation, how quickly they must be distributed, and what forms of reuse should be permitted without additional licensing friction.
Technology could also make ownership boundaries harder to police. Derived data can be transformed repeatedly, combined with alternative datasets and fed into models that produce outputs far removed from the original trade or quote. The commercial value may sit not in the raw data itself but in the intelligence created from it.
For exchanges, that creates an incentive to move further up the value chain into analytics, indices and data services. For brokers and asset managers, it increases the value of data governance and licence management. For regulators, it makes the old distinction between public market information and proprietary information progressively harder to draw.
The investment and strategic implications
The market-data battle matters beyond trading operations. Exchange groups with durable data franchises can generate recurring revenues and deepen customer relationships, but those same revenues can attract regulatory scrutiny if users view fees as unavoidable or opaque.
Data vendors and consolidated-tape providers may benefit from demand for simpler access, normalisation and distribution. Meanwhile, brokers with strong internal data infrastructure may be able to reduce dependence on expensive duplication and turn proprietary analytics into a competitive advantage.
The risk is that regulatory intervention changes the economics faster than business models can adapt. A stricter reasonable-commercial-basis regime, new consolidated tape, changes to protected-quote rules or stronger transparency requirements can alter the value of proprietary feeds and the bargaining power of their users.
Conclusion
Market data has become too important to be treated as a technical footnote to trading. It is simultaneously a commercial asset, a regulatory input, a competitive necessity and a public-market utility.
That combination explains why the question of ownership is becoming harder, not easier. Exchanges have legitimate claims over the infrastructure and products they build. Market participants have legitimate concerns when access to essential information becomes expensive or contractually complex. Regulators must preserve incentives for innovation while ensuring that price discovery does not become dependent on information available only to those able to buy every premium feed.
The likely outcome is not the end of proprietary market data. It is a clearer division between the information markets need in order to function fairly and the information firms are willing to pay extra for in order to compete more effectively. The institutions that define that boundary will shape the economics of trading for years to come.
Where the ownership debate is moving
| Layer | Primary question | Likely direction |
| Core consolidated data | What information is essential for fair participation? | More standardisation, supervision and pricing constraints. |
| Proprietary depth and latency | When is richer or faster data genuinely optional? | Commercial pricing remains, but necessity and substitutability receive more scrutiny. |
| Licensing and reuse | Who may transform, redistribute or train models on the data? | Greater focus on derived data, non-display use and machine-readable licences. |
| Connectivity | Are access and port fees effectively part of the data price? | Regulators increasingly examine total access cost rather than subscription fees alone. |
| Analytics and AI | Who owns value created from raw market information? | Competition shifts toward analytics, models and derived intelligence rather than raw feeds alone. |
References
1. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — Market Data Infrastructure
2. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — National Market System Plans Rulemaking
4. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — NYSE proprietary market data fee filing, March 2026
6. ESMA — Simplifies MiFID II/MiFIR obligations on market data, 23 February 2026
7. ESMA — Authorises EuroCTP as the Consolidated Tape Provider for shares and ETFs, 27 July 2026
8. ESMA — Consolidated Tape Providers
9. IOSCO — Market Data in the Secondary Equity Market: Current Issues and Considerations, April 2022
10. Cboe Global Markets — Form 10-Q for quarter ended 31 March 2026