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I disagree, there are competitors for almost all the non-internally created datasets which implies the streams are available outside the Terminal.

IMO the network effect is the biggest thing to break and that would need to begin with the buy-side. If Pension Manager XYZ with $N trillion AUM uses Bloomberg then you can be damn sure so does anyone wanting to do business with them.

There are many temporally-exclusive agreements on all sorts of data, some government-supplied (!). "Temporally-exclusive" means that anyone can use the data, but one company gets it 5-600 seconds early.

Those are usually rather owned by ThomsonReuters. They make huge amounts of money with exclusive data feeds for algo traders. For the terminal it doesn't matter if you see the data a few milliseconds later, too late to trade anyway.

yes financial data is a big, cartelized mess. That, by the way, is probably in itself an excellent business opportunity for a law firm.