It's as deliberate as a cow eating grass. The cow deliberately eats the grass but because of the game theory involved (lack of information, lack of coordination, incentives etc.), the pasture disappears. The point of my comment (and the article's, I think) was that companies want the revenue, but don't deliberately want to harm us.
Companies aren't cows. They know. Big companies always have people studying the larger economic trends of the markets they are in and looking into the future--you know, people who are always ignored if they point out anything or advocate anything that would be counter to this quarter's profits.
