You’re deeply confused about the situation if you think Westlaw and Lexis have anything to do with PACER. You use those services to access legal opinions. The underlying opinions are free on PACER and also usually posted on courts websites. Westlaw and LEXIS don’t index most of what’s in PACER. Conversely, PACER doesn’t contain most of what’s in Westlaw and LEXIS. PACER for the most part only has electronic files going back to the early 2000s. You can’t use it for serious legal research. Westlaw and Lexis have comprehensive data based of opinions going back to the 18th century because they went and scanned in all those paper records. (And West has been around since 1870 and has been building its collection ever since then.) The government (in fact, governments—there are hundreds of mostly autonomous court systems in the country) isn’t limiting access—it simply doesn’t have the data that makes West and Lexis so valuable.
Are you sure? I have not used Westlaw or Lexis, but from a quick search, both of them appear to offer services – albeit distinct from their 'main' services – that provide access to court dockets and corresponding documents [1] [2], which would account for the rest of what's in PACER.
You’re right, I forgot West/Lexis have docket tracking. I assume that gets data from PACER, but it also gets data from court “runners” (people who go to courts to get filings).
That being said, despite that the overlap between West/LEXIS is very small. The docket tracking is an adjunct service that you use in the unusual situation where you’re keeping tabs on a case you’re not participating in. Its not real time (day after) which is a big thing because the PACER/ECF notification is the official notice that triggers time periods and deadlines. It’s also vastly more expensive than PACER (like $50 per document).
That doesn’t address OP’s point, which is West/Lexis’s market dominance. And that is based on those systems having 200+ years of human annotated and indexed case law. PACER doesn’t have that data.
