Yes. As Adam Smith sort of points out, they also make greater specialization possible. When you get access to a larger market (through dropping trade barriers, improved transportation technology, population growth, or whatever) you can either expand your business or increase its specialization (making it, one hopes, more efficient).

What's interesting is that in the 20th Century the big trend was that people expanded their businesses; now, it seems that people are instead specializing more. Presumably some of the reasons for this are to be found in The Nature of the Firm, but while I don't think Coase has the whole story, I think his viewpoint is helpful here. It's not that people are collaborating in smaller groups than before; we're all still collaborating with everyone else in the economy. It's that the nature of that collaboration is changing from intra-company collaboration to inter-company collaboration. Coase focuses on inter-company collaboration through market mechanisms, but another important kind of collaboration is non-market exchange of information. The vast common body of free software and knowledge that we all share access to is a major reason that we can launch an innovative web site today with one or two people working together for a few months.

If you wanted to launch Reddit (or HN) in 1990, you would have had to write client software, set up a modem bank, and ship starter kits to our clients with a CD-ROM and a modem inside. The fact that you can just buy access to the internet cheaply instead is collaboration through the market. So is being able to buy a multi-gigahertz machine with gigabytes of RAM for US$500.

But in 1990, you would have had to do a lot more. You would have had to drop US$500 on a compiler from Borland or somebody and write your code in C++. (If you preferred Lisp, you could drop US$3000 or so on a MacIvory from Symbolics instead; they weren't dead at the time. Or Lucid Common Lisp on a Sun, maybe; how much did that cost?) Now we can write our software in PLT Scheme or Python instead.

If you wanted to do cool AJAXy effects, even assuming that you could transfer the Web software of 2000 back to 1990, you'd still need to implement all the AJAXy stuff yourself, as I did in 2000, instead of just using Prototype or MochiKit or jQuery. A couple of years earlier, you would have had to use Java.

And today, you can run the whole thing on Linux. In 1990, you would have had to buy SunOS, or HP-UX, or Ultrix, or some other such horrible abortion, and the minimum price for that hardware was around $5000. And you probably would have had to recompile your kernel.

And when you have trouble load-balancing, you can Google to find out how people set up reverse proxies and round-robin DNS and the like, rather than inventing it for the first time and publishing a paper about it.

This growth of the information commons means that you can afford to be much more specialized today. You can focus on the unique aspects of your site, rather than figuring out how to run the first or second global information service.