[capableweb]

Generally I don't think you count profits that never happened as "cost to the taxpayer".

What if Facebook spend 2B USD on a product that was supposed to be wildly successful, but it failed big time, does that count as "costing the US tax money" as they never made the profit they could have made?

[matsemann]

The point you're missing here is that it's US regulations ("we can look at your customers' data at any time and you can't even notify them") that makes it so that US companies are losing lots of money and customers from the EU. So it's not a company making a wrong bet or so. It's companies being directly hampered by their connection to the US.

[capableweb]

> It's companies being directly hampered by their connection to the US.

No, the companies are being hampered by not following local (EU) regulation, so they get fined because of it. Has nothing to do with where the company is from, it might as well have been Indian, Chinese or from South Africa, it has to follow the regulation in the places it does business.

[pfannkuchen]

I believe the point is that if the US government had policies to never use such data for anything (e.g. criminal investigations, intelligence agencies perhaps), then the EU would not be worried about the data being in the US. The US government’s behavior is why they are worried about it.