If you wanted to attack bitcoin, wouldn't it make more sense to attack or conspire with the owners of the largest mining pools instead of trying to amass all that computational power?
Not really - because the pools are collections of individual miners that each can switch which pool they participate in on a whim. There aren't some much "owners" as facilitators. In practice we've already seen this, when several pools have gotten close to the 50% mark, individual minors have switched pools, or even split their participation across multiple pools.
