That's the sort of "information" the article has in mind. Google's or Facebook's vast tracking of online behaviour is, well, really big. But it has very little relevance to the supply chain.
They connect users to info by herding them.
Google has, what, 25 billion indexed pages? I don’t get those at random when I search. Likewise, I don’t see a random subset of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users or Amazon’s >12 million products. I don’t even see a complete list of my friends’ posts on Facebook; it thinks it knows better and herds me (and everyone else).
I don’t even see the same thing as other users searching for the same keywords: Googling “mouse” in a normal window gives me the computer peripheral, doing the same in an incognito window gives me the animal. Herding people based on what it thinks you want, but easily corruptible if desired.
On Google, some keywords bring up an alert saying some results were hidden because of copyright claims, giving me links to (IIRC) chillingEffect.org, which is a fairly on-the-nose kind of herding.
>> Fortunately, the rise of the Internet, and specifically Internet marketplace models, act as accelerants to the productivity benefits of the division of labour AND comparative advantage by reducing information asymmetry and increasing the likelihood of a perfect match with regard to the exchange of goods or services.
That is false. Maybe it was the case at the beginning, but now with a small number of big gatekeepers like Google, Amazon and Facebook, the internet actually increases information asymmetry. Mostly by concentrating user attention to a small number of companies/products and thereby encouraging herd mentality and distracting users away from real value which would make their lives better.