What would the alternative be? To have Google et al be above the law?

You can't have it both ways. If you give up your data, you give up your data. You can't just give it up for special purposes. You don't get to choose. (And neither does Google or whoever is on the other end of the transaction)

You could even take all government influence out of it and still have problems. Companies could just buy up each other, pay for illegal data transfers, and so on. That's kinda the point here. A tiny little piece of data like my email to Aunt Claire this morning is almost completely worthless. Almost. But zillions of pieces, accumulating day-by-day? The value, in both monetary and intelligence terms, just keeps going up. Every day the economics of getting that data, by hook or crook, changes in favor of it being lost. And once it's lost, in most cases it's lost forever. There's no "going back" to having the data private again. That's an unsustainable system.