**5. Conclusion**

In sum, therefore, the economic analysis reveals that the strategic motivations for using zero-rating are complex, and turn on a wide range of contextual factors, across all parts of the internet ecosystem. The five questions posed here tease out some factors to inform all ecosystem participants, but especially policy-makers and regulators.

The questions both draw upon, and highlight the fact that, the internet ecosystem is as complex, dynamic and adaptive system that defies simplistic definitions, and cannot easily be analysed or governed using simple frameworks developed for an environment with simple, linear relationships where cash flows closely followed product flows. To the extent that the ecosystem closely intertwines the activities of ISPs and CAPs with end users, it is no longer sufficient for regulators and competition authorities to consider zero-rating as solely an activity governed by the strategic intentions of ISPs alone. The questions posed in this chapter are not intended to substitute for detailed case-by-case analysis based upon economic principles of welfare maximisation, but rather stand as a complement to the frameworks currently being used in regulatory and judicial processes to assess likely harms and benefits.

There is much still to learn about competition and regulation of this complex ecosystem, but the questions here go some way to ensuring that scarce resources are used to investigate the cases most likely to be welfare harming.

## **Author details**

Bronwyn Howell1 \* and Roslyn Layton2

1 Victoria Business School, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

#### 2 Aalborg University, Denmark

\*Address all correspondence to: bronwyn.howell@vuw.ac.nz

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

**123**

*Strategic Use of Zero-rating of Mobile Data DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84130*

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