Ahh, thank you. That makes much more sense. So it's not that ETFs are specifically prohibited from purchasing them. Rather, if index providers exclude issuers who have a dual-share structure from their indices then any funds that track to an index wouldn't be purchasing stock in those issuers.

I think it's important to note that many ETFs aren't index-tracking so even though index providers may exclude the issuers with several share classes that doesn't mean the stock will be shunned by all ETFs.

Thanks, can you explain a bit further? (Nerdy curiosity here, I've done a lot of legal work with mutual funds & hedge funds but have no experience with ETFs so I'm both clueless and curious.) Prohibited by what? The prospectus? And what exactly is prohibited that assigning a different ticker gets around the prohibition? SNAP has a similar structure but I don't remember hearing the same buzz about that being an issue for ETFs when they went public.

Do you knwo why that is? It seems like having the two tickers would have all the same issues.

Different classes always trade with different tickers. When they trade, of course: Google has also a non-traded B class. (By the way, I don’t think the first statement is correct.)