I think you've expressed a US-centric perspective, where the US leads the world and the world reacts.
The rest of the world is advancing privacy legislation and making it difficult to do business in jurisdictions that don't enforce similar privacy concepts. This will increasingly become untenable for US businesses.
I think he is pointing out the lack of legislation in the US is a positive for these US based multinationals : they extract valueable info from it, which they can use in other markets too.
An upcoming EU startup which might want to target these multinationals markets is at a disadvantage because they can't.
The rest of the world is advancing privacy legislation and making it difficult to do business in jurisdictions that don't enforce similar privacy concepts. This will increasingly become untenable for US businesses.