[jorleif]

While you are of course right trivially about the sheer amount of information, I'm not so sure about the useless part. Right now a lot of consumer protection and activism is driven by someone trying to sift through similar information and then make a lot of noise about their findings. That is also inefficient in a way that favors certain kinds of players in the marketplace.

For instance, if I knew the producer of certain items, I might decide to buy directly from them instead of through a middleman, such as a grocery store, but now there are all kinds of barriers to doing just that. Furthermore, if I could somehow contact the coffee farmer who grew my coffee beans, then I could also ask him for a particular kind of bean that I might prefer. This is less efficient in the production sense than shipping everything in large batches, but might be more efficient in the sense of getting what I want. It is quite common when shopping for furniture to find exactly what you want, except too wide, narrow, high, etc. Having it hand-made in the west would be prohibitively expensive, perhaps 10x of the price of the item, so we settle for the one which is not quite right. But if there was a simple mechanism for ordering the modified item from the original developing world producer then that might be very useful.

I guess the question is not whether we could make marketplaces more visible to better know whom our elves are. The question is whether we want to.