> The more data you have, the better user experience you can provide, killing competition, through which they start getting less and less data of their own, eventually dying out.

The more data they have, the better-targeted advertising they can provide, because that data is more or less volunteered by their users even if conpanies don’t know to ask for it.

For most of the big companies, I’d say their UX is stuck in local maxima and can’t really become orders of magnitude better due to risk aversion — you’ll never collect the data that there’s a bigger maximum somewhere else that way. A smaller company willing to take risks can find those bigger maxima much more easily.