Since Xinhua has already a monopoly, that would be very hard to do, so I already suspected that there was no real crackdown taking place. The Wall Street Journal (available for subscribers and Google-users) was the basis of the story, focusing on "Xinhua 08", a new service to compete with Dow Jones and other financial data providers.
This was my - unedited - comment:
Ah, what you see here is a typical way how a state owned service provider and regulator tries to misuse its function as a regulator to enhance its business. This is really more about business than about politics, bad business to be precise, since it is obvious misuse of its position as a regulator to enhance its own news operation. Xinhua and others have tried this more often and mostly cannot get away with it.
Foreign data-providers will of course protest against this unfair business practise, but that is more for legal reasons than for operational. Xinhua has only jurisdiction over China, so foreign companies and Chinese companies with foreign entities (including those in Hong Kong) will have no problem in subscribing to any foreign data provider.
Interesting will be the position of Xinhua Finance, since they were established a decade ago to leverage the data of Xinhua and bring it on an international level. If it has an effect, they might lose some of their business. I do not think this has a
real effect on foreign businesses.
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