I’m in rough agreement — and have alluded to this in connection with the ‘kerfuffle’ over Bob Berring’s recent remarks on a Thomson-Reuters blog. I’d quibble slightly in that I see the problem less with key numbers and citators being proprietary products in the first place – in fact, the commercial, for-profit creation of these systems was in important respects a great service to the legal community. Rather, I’d object to some of the later barriers to competitive entry (most especially West’s attempts to exercise copyright over pagination, and the enshrinement of commercially-published reporters in the widely-used citation systems) and attempts to convert past innovations in the print publication environment into walls against competition in the online information realm.

I also agree with you that the time may be nigh to think about what some kind of ‘open-indexing’ system would look like. The devil is in the details, of course (in particular, how would quality-assurance work?), but the idea has promise for at least some segments of the legal marketplace.