There’s a very real cost to the actions of the U.S. Government in the San Bernardino case. From a civil liberties perspective, we’re all bearing it. But from an economic perspective, that cost is being born almost entirely by the one bright spot in the American economy: the technology sector.

To consider the impact this is having on tech firms, it’s critical to understand the change the internet has had on the world of business, taking the addressable market for any one product or service from a handful of localities through to the entire planet. But underlying this revolution is something else, which is just as critical as the technology itself: trust. Remember the early days of the web, when people were afraid to enter their credit card details? It took years to get to a point where there was enough trust that buying things online was considered normal.

This trust is absolutely implicit to the promise of the web.

And herein lies the problem with the U.S. Government’s policies on national security. San Bernardino is just one in a steady stream of U.S. Government actions that have undermined the world’s trust in the services and products of U.S. technology firms.

It was not so long ago that news of the PRISM program — the massive surveillance effort undertaken by the NSA — was made public as part of the Edward Snowden revelations. While it made headlines in the U.S., what is easier to overlook is the impact that the revelations had internationally, and not just in places that might have traditionally been suspicious of the U.S., such as China and Russia. This impact was felt in countries that are friends to the U.S. — even its allies.

For example, it led to Brazil, one of the world’s largest internet markets, deciding to create an internet constitution. This saw a massive increase in the regulation governing how Brazilian user data is stored. In fact, it almost resulted in the country forcing all foreign technology companies to store all Brazilian data locally.

And that’s just one example. The damage has also extended through to Europe, specifically through the Safe Harbor provisions that govern the transfer of data between the U.S. and the EU. These provisions had indemnified U.S. firms when they exported EU citizens’ personal data to the U.S., on the basis that they were providing a similar level of protection for that data in the U.S. as they would have if the data was stored in Europe. But as a result of U.S. surveillance of EU citizens, the European Court of Justice has invalidated the Safe Harbor agreement, and the EU is now examining whether companies such as Facebook ought to be allowed to transfer user data from Europe to the U.S. at all — on the grounds that the U.S. “does not afford an adequate level of protection of personal data.”

What’s the end result of all these U.S. Government actions that are compromising the trust people place in U.S. technology firms?

Well, China actually provides the perfect case study for the U.S. to answer that question. Back in 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee called for a ban on Huawei and ZTE products because of a fear of technological backdoors — just like the one the U.S. Government is now asking Apple to create. In the words of the committee, these Chinese companies “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence and thus pose a security threat to the United States and to our systems.”

Ironically enough, the U.S. Government is about to subject Apple to the same fate. The U.S. Government will leave Apple open to the accusation that its products aren’t really secure as a result of undue government influence.

There seems to be an assumption inside of Washington, DC, whether explicit or not, that U.S. tech firms’ superiority is insurmountable, that no matter how difficult the government makes life for these firms under the guise of national security, they cannot be challenged. The problem is, the sweep of business history suggests that superiority in innovation is fragile — and rather than being driven by any innate exceptionalism, it is closely tied to having the largest market to address. Historically, the size of the market that mattered was the domestic market. The internet has changed that to the market you could sell to internationally. And while Chinese technology firms now have a massive domestic market as a basis from which to grow, they have a much broader issue in terms of growing beyond that — simply because nobody trusts them.

The U.S., traditionally at least, has not had this problem. But the U.S. Government is doing its best to change this. Already it’s the case that America’s European allies don’t trust the U.S. with their citizens’ social media data. After forcing a backdoor into Apple’s phones — and who knows which could be the next company that gets a knock on the door — what is the rest of the world going to think?

If the U.S. is serious about housing the world’s greatest technology sector — and it should be, because it’s undoubtedly the most important economic sector of the future — then it is going to need to get more serious about fostering it and viewing it as more than just a place for whistle-stop tours for candidates to raise campaign funds. This isn’t to say that the government should do whatever the sector asks, but rather that it needs to be incredibly considered in the rules it imposes and the asks that it makes of the sector — because each of these are going to be closely scrutinized by every other country in the world. The principles that the U.S. lives by are the ones that the rest of the world will adopt.

In the case of San Bernardino, the FBI may find the answers it wants in that single cell phone, or it may not. But the government needs to be very clear that it’s not just Apple being dragged into this trial — it’s the entire U.S. tech sector, and by extension the future of the U.S. economy itself.