15.II CESR standards for ATSs

As noted, the ISD and FESCO provided no rules/guidance concerning data prices.1 CESR provided broad data accessibility standards for ATS.2 CESR recommended that ATSs needed to ‘make publicly available, on a reasonable commercial basis, information about quotes and/or orders that the qualifying system displays or advertises to the system users. Similarly, operators needed to make publicly available, on a reasonable commercial basis, information relating to completed transactions that the systems provide to users’ (emphasis added).3 In other words, CESR provided as a standard that pre- and post-trade data needed to be made available on a reasonable commercial basis. CESR stated that ATSs could fulfill the reasonable commercial basis-obligation by publishing the data ‘on a web-site, making it available to an information vendor (data vendor) or supplying it to any consolidated quotation system’.4 CESR thus enabled ATSs to comply with the reasonable commercial basis-provision by means of several publication arrangements. CESR did not specify the meaning of the term ‘on a reasonable commercial basis’.5 The CESR standard was in effect quite broad.