This has been widely known for at least a decade. I worked for an Amazon competitor back in 2013, and industry wide algorithmic price fuckery, including trying to figure out if your rivals were scraping you and poisoning their data, was common and openly discussed as a normal part of business operations.

The explicit directive of our economic system is to make as much money as possible in competition with everyone else. Or course companies are going to pour resources into using any and all technological fuckery to do that.