The value is that it's actually quite difficult to follow the market at such huge scale. If you're investing $100 billion and manage to mirror returns of the overall market, you deserve a good commission.
The Vanguard fund mentioned in the article manages $200 billion assets and mirrors the returns of S&P 500. As mentioned in the comments here its "commission" is 0.02% for investors of the scale we're talking about.
How much more than that does one deserve for mirroring the market returns?
Why? If we just want to follow the market, then we only occasionally need to adjust our positions in response to dilution or buyback events, right? Executing large trades efficiently is hard, but with a low turnover it's less of a problem.
