Do larger blocks give an advantage to the larger mining pools? Ex. Getting some sort of edge on mining the next block after finding one, seeing that the blocks will be larger?
Larger blocks give an advantage to larger and better connected pools, so they can propagate them faster. The propagation bottlenecks can fragment the network, where one larger well-intra-connected part (read: China) will be winning more orphan races, thus earning relatively more money -- creating financial incentives for further centralization.