Courts rule on the evidence provided. If a user challenges the fee, the company can easily document where every penny went, and therefore claim it is a reasonable charge. The user's only real recourse would be to prove that company is over-billing, but that would require evidence.
Pegging the cost to a set number of labor hours by law signals to companies that part of the cost of collecting this data is they must develop their internal systems in a way that they can quickly and easily comply with requests.
Almost always to the dismay of one party, and sometimes to the dismay of the general public.
But in general, EU/EC law is full of policy that gets interpreted as human judgement calls, and US law is full of details that are interpreted as badly-written code with a choice of parsers. The two styles are not compatible.