Spot on. Another comment here sounds like it may be suggesting mandatory bounties -- at first glance that sounds very bad for small players, but some thresholds and/or percentages of revenue make the concept more palatable. The users themselves should be able to receive some kind of equitable relief too, but it's difficult when a single user's data is worth <$100 yet the cost to the user is potentially a much larger sum.

Regardless, I completely agree - that's almost surely where this is headed.

The current administration is actively dismantling the EPA, so I'm not sure this is the best analogy.

There's no real appetite for regulation of commercial data use in the US on either end of the political spectrum. And this is a good thing, because GDPR-style regulation would do nothing but further entrench the big players and crowd out innovation.