Big cats in the wild are much larger than their canine counterparts. Yet domesticated dogs are, on average, larger than house cats, even despite being domesticated far longer. What happened to create this disparity, in terms of tastes in selective breeding?

by AcheronFlow
OryuSatellite

Domestic cats are descended from the Near Eastern (or African) wildcat [1], which is roughly the same size as a domestic cat [2], not from big cats. So the premise of your question seems wrong. Maybe you just mean to ask why humans haven't chosen to breed domestic cats to be much bigger than they are?

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/317/5837/519.full

[2] http://csct-dev.uwe.ac.uk/drupal/chacko/node/4