&gt; when the activity consumes a bunch of resources on zero sum activity<p>The thing to remember about the markets is that each individual trade is always zero sum, but the value of the markets comes from the aggregate total.<p>The behaviors that we <i>want</i> in our markets, price discovery, liquidity, easy risk management are all outcomes that are enabled by speculative market participants like market makers engaging in lots of zero sum activity.<p>So instead of decrying the zero sum activity what we want to do is drive down the price of it to the non zero sum participants.  And HFT market making has been prodigiously good at that.