[pitkali]

Because development costs money. Your "impossible to keep up" here is easily explained by Google simply investing more money in development and thus being able to "innovate" faster. The only way to compete is to invest more, but where do you get that money from?

The easy fix is to make them slow down development, but I fail to see how that's a good thing.

[kaba0]

Sure. Continuing my analogy to the British empire's rule over the seas has also surely resulted in technological improvements, but that is not the only way to achieve that.

For a more practical example, Linux is also developed mostly by paid employees, but they are from many different companies and thus improvements can't be weaponized as easily.