How could this be inconceivable to you? With all supplier and customer data codified into a standardised structured format, you’d instantly have a ”social network”of all the firms operating at various stages in a value chain, and probably the best model ever of how the whole economy is composed in detail. You’d get the bills of materials, ’recipes’ for just about anything anybody produces; you’d get their profit margins from the controlling modules, you’d be able to estimate the risk banks are exposed to by aggregating the loans they give out to companies and estimating the default risks of each and tot the up.

Forget knowing what executives google... you’d have a real-time fingerprint of the whole economy, ready to be explored and monetized.

This would be... terrifying. Imagine if google discovered that (oh, I don’t know) some firm supplying parts into the Pixel product line had high margins on one of those items, and decided to play hardball to push it down. Suppose Google discovered that one small firm competing with it depend ended on another customer for most of its current revenue, and Google decided to focus its ’competition’ on changing that key client’s idea?

It would be a nightmare.