This comes up all the time, especially in "Why can't the US do X?" discussions but isn't it just the equivalent of shouting down with "That will never scale!"
Of course it might not be exactly the same. Maybe the bigger country will need more servers spun up or a tweaked algorithm (to continue the analogy), but just saying a country is smaller doesn't mean things are a No before even being tried. I'm assuming there were railroads across other smaller countries before the US had the transcontinental railroad too.
So, specifically in the context of discussing direct democracy, size does matter.
It turns out that Switzerland is smaller than the Los Angeles metro area both in GDP and population.
It seems it's comparable in size, but not smaller
Take a look http://mapfrappe.com/?show=40241 (it's a rough sketch of Switzerland but the size should be right)
Edit: yes, I think parent meant population, not actual size
Edit: Also, Wikipedia is possibly a better source for comparing sizes of landmasses.
LA for example is only about 66 percent: http://www.laalmanac.com/education/ed33a.htm
