[HN Gopher] US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
___________________________________________________________________
US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
Author : gausswho
Score : 528 points
Date : 2025-07-08 22:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| cebert wrote:
| [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504694
| ars wrote:
| "after finding that the commission behind it failed to follow
| required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making
| process."
| throw10920 wrote:
| I hope the FTC tries to re-submit the rule while following
| procedure - click-to-cancel is really good for consumers... but
| not enough to justify trying to break laws to pass it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You realize the current FTC is not the same FTC that did
| this? There's no way this FTC does anything in favor of
| consumers
| fwlr wrote:
| The FTC was warned at the time that they were flouting required
| procedures and that their rule would therefore not survive legal
| scrutiny. Lo and behold it did not.
| dboreham wrote:
| Because systematic corruption presumably?
| jibe wrote:
| If you are sniffing out corruption, aren't the ones flouting
| required procedures likely the corrupt ones?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Kinda, but corruption in my favor is unlikely to see me
| complain about it.
| wrasee wrote:
| That's obviously no justification, all corruption is in
| someone's favour. Society functions by rules. Break those
| founding principles and you break everything.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| What if the "required procedures" are held in place by
| corruption?
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Almost never.
|
| Whistleblowers are almost always revealing information that
| they are legally prevented from revealing, otherwise you
| wouldn't need a whistleblower. A simple FOIA request would
| suffice.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| More that they mistakenly thought that doing the right thing
| meant they didn't have to do the thing right.
| bjt12345 wrote:
| But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the
| right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done
| that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do
| given that now it won't be done.
| techpineapple wrote:
| Right, if they were screwing over customers, we'd call it
| disruption and give them a medal, if not $1 billion
| dollars. Since they're trying to help people, we wag our
| fingers at them.
| weberer wrote:
| >they were flouting required procedures
| guelo wrote:
| who warned them?
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| A then-commissioner who is now the head of the FTC.
| guelo wrote:
| That commissioner also hated the fact that consumers were
| going to stop being robbed by big corps.
| VonTum wrote:
| I find it unproductive to assign emotion to such blatant
| corruption. I'd rather frame it as "That comissioner sees
| it to be in his personal best interest to not stop
| consumers being robbed by big corps."
| miltonlost wrote:
| Ah so a Trump appointee and 2 judges appointed by Trump.
| Now that's a group I would never trust to follow the law.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Please point to an example of these warnings.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory
| analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect
| of $100 million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of
| Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a
| $100 million effect.
|
| > But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's
| impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance
| costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used
| fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the
| lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the
| 8th Circuit ruling said. Despite the administrative law
| judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary
| regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the
| final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule," the
| judges' panel said.
|
| It says it in the article
| braiamp wrote:
| The fact that it takes more than 24 hours to put a 1 click
| cancel button is alien to me.
| delfinom wrote:
| Well, after you factor in some of these companies are
| probably large corps with layers of middle management. It
| will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Which explains the issue with the law neatly:
|
| 1. Not pegged at inflation, so the threshold is
| continually moving downward. 2. All it takes is a couple
| of bad actor companies to blow out the threshold. If you
| take the companies at their word, then you will never get
| under this threshold. Why trust them?
| jdlshore wrote:
| You must not work on these sorts of systems. It can
| easily take more than 24 hours. In case you're genuinely
| interested in learning more, here's how it works.
|
| There are good reasons for it working this way, BTW. The
| needs of a company with hundreds or thousands of people
| are different than the needs of hobbyists and early-stage
| startups.
|
| 1. A user experience designer analyzes the user flow and
| decides where to put the cancellation button. They make
| decision about style, layout, and wording. This isn't a
| ton of work, but something so critical to the company's
| business and retention numbers will probably involve a
| lot of review, discussion, and bike shedding. This could
| easily take 24 people-hours of work on its own.
|
| 2. Somebody programs the front-end change. They probably
| have to put it behind a feature flag so it's not visible
| until the back end is ready.
|
| 3. Somebody programs the back-end. They think about
| security, authentication, authorization, CSRF. That's
| probably handled, but again, this is a critical feature
| and deserves extra care.
|
| 4. Somebody programs the interface to the company's
| internal systems. They're usually kind of a pain to work
| with. Billing, marketing, support, customer success.
| Something probably sends an email to the user. Maybe
| there's a follow up flow to try to get them back with a
| special offer a month later. Etc.
|
| 5. The change is tested. Preferably with automated tests,
| but a feature like this has tendrils into systems
| throughout the company, and a lot of moving parts, so
| manual testing is also important. If it goes wrong, it's
| a big deal, involving the potential for chargebacks and
| lawsuits, both of which are expensive at scale.
|
| Throughout all this, you're dealing with legacy code,
| because billing is one of the oldest systems the company
| has, and the one with the most risk of change, so the
| code is nasty and doesn't follow current conventions.
| Every change is painful and tedious.
|
| It's alien to you that this could take more than 24
| hours? At any company of size, I have trouble imagining
| it taking less.
| braiamp wrote:
| How many companies of "size" you know of? Because that
| process looks HORRIBLY inefficient and only primed to
| extract as much money of the consumer. You just need to
| put it in the account screen. A big red button. Your
| _workflow_ is there to make excuses. If the move was the
| other way, you would gladly pay the cost, but because it
| actually hurts your "business model" then it is suddenly
| a problem. No buddy, I call BS on all that, and call BS
| on the law itself.
| claytongulick wrote:
| So, you're holding a strong opinion about something that
| you're completed uneducated about and have no experience
| with?
|
| ANY software change in a non-hobby business goes through
| a change process.
|
| One as significant as an entirely new account cancelation
| flow requires extensive planning, design and testing.
|
| What if you have equipment like a set top box? What if a
| shipping label needs to be mailed out? What if there are
| state-by-state regulations that must be complied with?
| What if you have to issue prorated returns of prepaid
| subscription fees? What if different accounts have
| different cancelation terms because of bulk pricing? And
| a million other things that you have to think about,
| design for and test.
|
| Of course you can solve all this. But it's certainly not
| "BS" that it'll take more than 24 hours.
|
| The FTC knew this. They cheated their process to ram
| through a rule. But you like the rule they tried to cheat
| to implement, so it's ok then, I guess.
| jdlshore wrote:
| For the types of issues we're discussing here, we're
| talking about companies making more than $50mm yearly,
| which is about 75-100 employees. So successful small
| businesses and larger. I don't have exact numbers, but
| this size business is very common. Most professional
| programmers will have seen the issues I'm talking about.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Even a company of 100 people should have a change
| process. I work in infra mostly and to even shut down a
| VM that has already been decommissioned I have to go
| through a change process. You can't have a dozen IT/dev
| cowboys just doing things they think are fine on a whim
| because you have to take into account what all the other
| teams in the company are doing. We've got 30 people in
| our IT dept and change processes are absolutely crucial
| to not fucking things up on a regular basis.
| axus wrote:
| Of course now that the FTC rule is well known, anyone
| designing a new system would require click-to-cancel. The
| new burden is low, but at the time the big companies
| probably spent millions to fix it.
|
| A more extreme example would be the US Clean Air Act and
| how the EPA extended the rules to regulate carbon dioxide
| emissions. Obviously going to cost a lot of money, but a
| necessary change to dodge climate disaster. That rule had
| to wait for Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act
| to become legal. Hopefully this minor consumer protection
| rule will be supported by Congress as well.
| lozenge wrote:
| We are assuming the calculation for the number of
| companies affected is correct. If they are using a
| provider like Shopify or a WordPress plugin, the cost
| will only be to upgrade the plugin.
|
| I don't know that the backend is necessarily needed. If
| the button only opened a support ticket/sent an email
| then the rest can be done by the employees who already
| processed cancellations on the phone. They just don't
| need to be on the phone with the customer to do it.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| Exactly, currently at some point on page 10 of click-
| throughs, is the "real" cancel button, and essentially
| you just need to make that the "first" cancel button and
| link straight to it.
| guelo wrote:
| Why are you pasting the article when it doesn't include any
| warnings that were given to the ftc at the time?
| voxic11 wrote:
| It literally says they were warned by the administrative
| judge that a preliminary regulatory analysis was required
| to make such a rule.
|
| > Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC
| did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and
| instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory
| analysis alongside the final Rule,"
| voxic11 wrote:
| Another example from the article
|
| > At the time of the vote, Holyoak's dissenting statement
| accused the majority of hurrying to finalize the rule before
| the November 2024 election and warned that the new regulation
| "may not survive legal challenge."
| xedrac wrote:
| I always felt like those click to unsubscribe links were nothing
| more than a "please prove to us with certainty that this is an
| actively used account so we can set a sticky bit on it and sell
| that info for $$$"
| orev wrote:
| That's a commonly held idea for spam emails. This is about
| services you've signed up and pay for on a recurring basis, and
| was targeted at companies who make it very easy to open an
| account, but then require byzantine methods to cancel.
| DANmode wrote:
| That is a valid paranoia,
|
| but also, not the kind of subscription the article is about.
| globalnode wrote:
| just mark them as spam, hurts them more and doesnt notify them
| of anything.
| whycome wrote:
| It's like browser popups that only give you the option of block
| or allow. I want neither! Block means I add that site to a
| permanent local list and I really need no record of it at all.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| From a different article [1]:
|
| > But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the
| FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a
| preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for
| rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed
| $100 million.
|
| > The FTC had argued that it was not required to prepare the
| preliminary analysis because its initial estimate of the rule's
| impact on the national economy was under the $100 million
| threshold -- even though ultimately the presiding officer
| determined the impact exceeded the threshold.
|
| This is a case where congress really did pass a concrete law, and
| the court is requiring the FTC to follow it. Sucks that a
| reasonable rule is getting voided for the sloppiness but I really
| don't think the courts are indefensibly out of line.
|
| [1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5390731-appeals-
| court-...
| jordanb wrote:
| From googling apparently the "presiding officer" is appointed
| by the FTC chair. So it sounds like the FTC spiked its own
| case.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| It was Lina Khan. She just felt strongly about going out the
| way she came in -- losing every single case.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Illumina, Tapestry, Kroger, Lockheed Martin would disagree.
|
| Also, didn't she ,,build" the right to repair laws?
| jordanb wrote:
| There is a new FTC administration.
|
| I interpret this as being the incoming FTC wanted to kill
| this but not withdrawal (due to bad optics).
|
| They wanted to lose the case and did so by changing a
| judgment they controlled so that the rule could fail a
| legal procedural challenge.
| bluGill wrote:
| It better fits the facts that the incoming FTC wants
| this, but they want to do the job right. At least some of
| the incoming FTC was in place when they rule was passed
| in the first place and their statements then say they
| wanted the rule but they wanted the correct procedures
| done so that it would stand up in court.
| jordanb wrote:
| If they wanted to change how they implement the rule they
| could have withdrawn it rather than continue to an
| adverse judgement in court.
|
| Basically the FTC is required to go through a lengthy
| (probably multi-year) impact analysis if they determine
| that the rule will cause more than $100 million in impact
| to the US economy.
|
| The previous administration determined that this rule
| would not meet the threshold, allowing quick
| implementation. The current administration then said
| "actually we think this would meet the threshold" giving
| the court an excuse to strike the rule down.
|
| If the trump administration is correct that trapping
| people in gotya-contracts by making it difficult to
| cancel really constitutes $100 million of economic
| activity in the US, I think that says that there's
| something truly rotten about the basis of our economy.
| bluGill wrote:
| You would have attacked them for withdrawing the rule as
| well. You have setup a can't win situation and then are
| attacking someone for losing.
|
| If Liberals really wanted this rule they would have
| followed the law. Evidence is the conservatives when this
| was passed objected because the law was not being
| followed. They were then left in this can't win
| situation.
| jordanb wrote:
| I would have criticized them for getting rid of a rule
| that protects consumers, yes.
|
| But it would have been far more honest than what they've
| done here, where they set up a kabuki theater legal
| defense so that they can avoid the bad politics of
| killing a very good rule to protect monied special
| interests.
| fritzo wrote:
| The U.S. Court of Appeals has therefore quantified the severity
| of this issue.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Typical decel nonsense to add all these preliminary analyses.
| This is CEQA/NEPA type garbage.
|
| Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and
| that will probably be sufficient.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Normally I'm aligned but this is sort of a NEPA rule making
| sticking a monkeywrench in the gears creating new
| regulations, so I'm not totally opposed to the principle, as
| irritating as it is here.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration
| but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.
|
| Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down
| societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and
| that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend
| to a new wind.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| A major unwritten rule of american society is that there is no
| bigger crime than economic friction to the shareholder...
| including statute itself.
| skort wrote:
| It's interesting that businesses can build an obviously toxic
| subscription model that robs consumers of both money and time,
| but when asked to change it now we have to consider their
| costs.
|
| I understand the idea behind the threshold for changing rules
| but this still feels very broken. There is a constant struggle
| of having to do everything perfectly to make any positive
| progress, but bad actors can operate however they like with
| seemingly little repercussions.
| avhception wrote:
| While I share your frustration, I don't think we should lower
| the bar for positive progress. Because that's how one becomes
| a bad actor themselves.
| immibis wrote:
| When bad actors have a low bar but good actors have a high
| bar, the country is bound to collapse. Look at how many
| rules the current regime is flouting. But the other side
| has to dot every i for some reason.
| roenxi wrote:
| Are we still talking about click-to-cancel here? There
| aren't 'other sides' in any meaningful sense on this sort
| of administrative decision. There is a solid consensus
| that people shouldn't have to pay for subscriptions they
| don't want and a couple of broadly inconsequential points
| to debate on how to implement it.
|
| This is exactly the sort of situation where just
| following all the rules and procedures is fine and it
| doesn't, within a pretty broad range of outcomes, who
| gets final say.
| fireflash38 wrote:
| The "other side" here is the political group that is
| consistently anti-regulation, anti-consumer, anti-
| government.
| bluGill wrote:
| The "other side" does not consider themselves anti-
| consumer. You disagree with them on what anti-consumer
| means, but they have their own reasons to consider their
| position pro-consumer and you are doing debate a
| disservice by ignoring that.
|
| They do consider themselves anti-regulation and anti-
| government in general, but they are not (mostly)
| anarchists, they do agree with some regulation and
| government, they just want the minimum possible and thus
| place a high bar on how bad the alternatives must be
| before they will agree to regulation/government.
| avhception wrote:
| Thanks for chiming in and pointing this out. I, too, am
| frustrated by the setback of this nullification.
|
| In my original comment, I was talking about the general
| case for due process. "Progress" is almost as useless a
| category as "good" and "bad".
|
| Debates have become astonishingly partisan.
| avhception wrote:
| I for one was definitely speaking about the general case,
| not this particular case. My point was that due process
| is not, generally speaking, a bad thing - even if it
| means that "progress" is sometimes a little slow to come
| by.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I think we should absolutely lower this particular bar.
| braiamp wrote:
| The bar should be where changes happen to move in the
| correct direction easily, while moving in the incorrect
| direction harder. If the rule was to "force companies to
| have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process
| would have zero burdens, because the "potential gains" of
| doing so would be enormous.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is easy to say. However I don't think you can define
| "correct direction" in a useful way that also gets at
| what you mean. Every definition you can come up with
| someone will find a loop hole that fits the letter of
| your definition, while it is against what you mean.
|
| By putting process in place for rules we give us time to
| notice bad rule proposals and give us a process to stop
| them.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| Rules that give leeway to act when consumer costs are
| estimated to be above a certain threshold, instead of
| when company costs are below a certain threshold would be
| a much better, if still imperfect, rule that would
| satisfy the "correct direction in a useful way".
|
| Just off the top of my head, you could have a rule that
| if some business activity is estimated to cost
| _consumers_ $100 million or more, then FTC can implement
| it instead of looking at the cost to companies. The
| "average US household" spends $200 a year on forgotten or
| unused subscriptions [1], if even 10% of those are due to
| a lack of click to cancel, that is $2.6 billion per year.
|
| [1] https://thedesk.net/2025/05/cnet-subscription-
| survey-2025/
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing
| cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero
| burdens
|
| I can't speak to hypotheticals with certainty, but a
| straightforward reading of this law is that it would have
| exactly the same regulatory process requirements as the
| requirement to remove them.
| sameermanek wrote:
| Devil is in the details, they said each company would have to
| pay for less than 23 hrs to a low level engineer to avoid the
| $100 mil impact.
|
| How much time do you think an intern would need to render a
| button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already
| implemented function in the code base. Especially with
| trillions poured into the AI?
|
| This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of
| idiots know it
| firesteelrain wrote:
| These "bench full of idiots" are not blind to the fact that
| there are deceptive practices regarding subscriptions. FTC
| didn't do their job right unfortunately and here we are. Now,
| new administration and it's doubtful this will get picked up
| again barring any law passed by Congress.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average
| is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few
| of them can spend a lot longer.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Sure, 23 hours on average is generous if the goal is
| honest implementation. But the issue isn't the time. It
| is that companies don't want this button to exist at all.
| They are not stalling because it's hard; they're stalling
| because friction equals profit. That's why you get
| weaponized complexity, endless "design reviews" and
| inflated estimates. The FTC did their job, sort of. They
| got "cancelled" (hehe) because of a bureaucratic hurdle.
|
| The industry just doesn't want to play fair.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Your argument presumes that "cost" is "money spent to
| implement," when in reality any reduction in predicted
| revenue is also a "cost."
|
| The cost of allowing people to cancel subscriptions is more
| than the cost to implement a button.
| arzig wrote:
| There's a non trivial chance this interacts with credit card
| processing. There is also app the legal liability of you tell
| someone meet are cancelled and continue charging them. So
| probably so not something you trust an intern to do.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| This is stuff that companies already handle with their
| current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit
| that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is
| something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at
| and expect them to finish in three or so working days,
| maybe slightly longer.
|
| The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies
| have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're
| using malicious compliance to argue that this feature
| specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at
| least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration
| of the design phase.
| bluGill wrote:
| Just testing this should take more than 23 hours for non-
| trivial code. Ship it and pray it works is not a good plan
| when if the code doesn't work the government will be coming
| after you.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| I am not getting it. The rule makes competition in markets
| higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster. And thus
| improve economic situation, not only in markets affected by
| rule, but also on all other markets, in case customer wants to
| take his money elsewhere.
|
| And on international scale, because more competitive companies
| presumably out-compete foreign competitors.
|
| So, FTC needs some permission and review to make national
| economy money?
| sokoloff wrote:
| The FTC was not given unlimited rule-making power by
| Congress, and has to live within the power granted to them.
|
| Issuing an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) and
| conducting a regulatory analysis for certain rules are
| examples of such limits. The FTC did not follow the second
| (as was required) in this case.
|
| Whether I happen to agree with the change they enacted (I do)
| doesn't change the fact that I want my government agencies to
| follow the rules laid out for them. Because as surely as the
| sun rises in the east, sooner or later they'll propose a rule
| I don't agree with and I want there to be a lawful process
| and framework in place then, and therefore also now.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| >The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because
| dollars flow to best offers faster.
|
| That's an insufficiently nuanced view of how competition
| works. Imagine two companies offering otherwise identical
| services, at identical price points, _except_ that one
| company starts to offer click to cancel and the other does
| not. What happens next?
|
| It's possible the other company implements it too. But it's
| also possible the other company lowers its prices, trading
| profit margin for trade stickiness. Enforcing click to cancel
| wouldn't give the other company the option to respond in the
| way it sees best.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| In general the better experience will command higher price,
| right. That is true, and by forcing same lowest level on
| everyone we are constructing artificial floor on how bad an
| experience can be.
|
| Or at least ensuring that bad experience is so profitable
| that the competitor is ready to even pay the fee for
| violations.
|
| Illegal markets operate in this territory. No consumer
| protection there, sorry.
|
| I started to understand the question more, thank you for
| your comment
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Always happy to facilitate deeper understanding, even
| when I disagree with you. No problem!
| highwayman47 wrote:
| Severing contracts for me, not for thee.
| standardUser wrote:
| The 8th circuit court of appeals is the most conservative, with
| only one judge appointed by a Democratic president.
| dmix wrote:
| What about the earlier administrative judge who warned FTC they
| were ignoring established rules when it was reviewed the first
| time, then FTC proceeded to ignore that judge and passed it
| anyway, which resulted it in being in front of this appeals
| court?
| bluGill wrote:
| In this case it quickly becomes clear that the court was right.
| The ends do not justify the means. Score one for conservatives
| for following/enforcing the law I guess.
| thrance wrote:
| Weird how they only enforce the law when it serves their
| interests though.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is false. The conservatives have made it clear that
| they support the rule, but it needs to be done right. The
| real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the
| law?
| standardUser wrote:
| > The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore
| the law?
|
| I hope you don't get accidentally deported to a foreign
| prison by those lofty conservatives who are SO concerned
| with following the letter of the law.
|
| But yeah, when a far right court digs up a technicality
| that just happens to serve the corporate interests that
| line the pockets of those who appointed these judges
| well... that's the justice you must truly value.
| bluGill wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
|
| I do not defend conservatives when they don't follow the
| letter of the law. Except perhaps in cases where the law
| itself is unjust - however that is not your argument here
| so we can ignore that. There have also been cases where I
| didn't understand the full law and so have had to change
| my mind once I realized what I'm missing - but that
| doesn't seem to be the case here either.
|
| On topic is a violation of the law. It isn't just a
| technicality here either, it is a big deal that when
| there are large effects of a potential rule we ensure we
| take the time to figure out what the real effects of it
| are. There are all too often unexpected downsides to some
| rule/law and when those downsides are bad enough the
| results can be worse than the problem you are trying to
| prevent. (it might not be in this case - but time was not
| given to figure out if that is the case so we don't know)
| standardUser wrote:
| If you follow this stuff enough, you know that any court
| worth it's salt can come up with justifications for any
| ruling it wants, that they are often dissenting opinions
| (statistically much less so in this, the most
| conservative court in the country), and that another,
| totally unrelated technicality will sometimes be
| 'discovered' by a subsequent court in subsequent appeals.
| I mean just look at the absurd acrobatics going on in the
| SC these days.
|
| But I love the IDEA of then justice system you're
| pretending exists.
| thrance wrote:
| You're completely brainwashed, this is sad to see. You're
| getting fucked over as much as the rest of us, but
| instead of fighting back you're asking for more. Purely
| out of spite and hate for us. How sad.
| bell-cot wrote:
| For those unfamiliar - that's one "D" judge, out of _17_ judges
| on this court. And that one "D" wasn't one of the three judges
| hearing this case.
|
| And yet the three "R" judges who were (hearing this case) chose
| to editorialize in their opinion (
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca8.110...
| ) about how the FTC was the Good Guys here...just hopelessly
| incompetent Good Guys.
|
| (Yeah, it seems trivial to argue that the Dem's are also
| hopelessly incompetent - at getting "D" judges onto Federal
| Court benches.)
| HPsquared wrote:
| The time to unsubscribe is now!
| dalemhurley wrote:
| Here is an idea, make your service value for money and people
| will not want to cancel.
|
| If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain
| customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel then your
| product needs to be improved.
| db48x wrote:
| That is a novel idea! But ironically it is not actually the
| issue that was in front of the court.
| silisili wrote:
| You just offended siriusxm, every newspaper, and every gym in
| the country.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Office365. I only have it because it's necessary for work not
| because I want to use the product.
| delecti wrote:
| WaPo and NYT were both very easy to cancel.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| WaPo was easy when I canceled last November. The lost time
| I canceled a NYT subscription, it still required a phone
| call.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| They say it requires a phone call but amazingly an email
| that's says you will charge back any future charge works
| too.
|
| Almost like they can do it without the phone or
| something.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Don't forget swimming pool season pass.
|
| I will buy my next season pass when I have a history of entry
| transactions that _proves_ I could have saved by buying
| one...
| sensanaty wrote:
| Man what the fuck is it with gyms? I'm not even in the US,
| but even in the Netherlands where these kind of things are
| generally super simple and hassle-free (by law) I've had some
| nightmarish, headache inducing situations with gyms. I've
| literally never encountered anything else, ever, nearly as
| bad as dealing with gyms and their contracts in my entire
| life. It was a million times easier closing brokerage
| accounts with decent chunks of money in them than it was to
| cancel a gym membership I once had.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most gyms are over subscribed - if everyone who has a
| membership actually went to the gym they wouldn't have
| enough space/equipment for everyone. They would need to
| raise their rates to afford more. That is those who have a
| membership but don't go to the gym are subsidizing those
| who do go to the gym.
|
| The more expensive gyms are not this way. They will let you
| cancel easily. They will often out of good customer service
| pause your membership if you don't visit at all for a
| month. However they cost twice as much and often have worn
| out equipment that a much cheaper gym would have replaced.
| As such if you really visit a gym one that makes canceling
| is hard.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain
| customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel, then your
| business model should be illegal.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Ok, but also, I just want to stop paying for things sometimes.
|
| Subscribing to a services isn't a vow of "until death do us
| part" and I don't want businesses trying to act like it is or
| make it so.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| My favorite underappreciated aspect of the iOS app store is its
| absolutely friction-free cancellation.
|
| It makes me much more willing to trial a subscription service
| because I know I won't have to spend an hour of my life on the
| phone with a lovely Filipino man to stop that service.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| This. My iPhone is still a pleasure to use, everyday. But
| perhaps I can only appreciate this because I was an android
| user for years.
|
| The killer app for me on iPhone? Files. I literally switched
| from iPhone 3 to android because it didn't have a file manager!
| Thankfully I came back.
| politelemon wrote:
| It was the opposite journey for me. I never felt for once
| that it was my iPhone, perhaps because I was an android user
| for years.
| oblio wrote:
| Apparently Google Play has the same cancellation mechanism.
| arielcostas wrote:
| Google Play also has that if you subscribe through there (which
| might be more expensive because of the fee Google takes), plus
| an easier refund system if you subscribe to something and
| decide it's not worth paying it
| nerdjon wrote:
| That and the reminder emails from Apple.
|
| It is one reason that with this switch allowing apps to send me
| outside of Apple's Ecosystem to subscribe, I hope that
| developers realize that if they make this the only option there
| are likely many people like myself that just won't subscribe to
| your app. I am far more likely to try a subscription that costs
| a couple dollars a month if it is through the app store instead
| of through some random website.
| xyst wrote:
| The USA is not a country for the people. It's a country for the
| rich and powerful.
|
| The game is rigged and enough deluded people think they can
| "game" it as well.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This was pretty well established by the constitution, only you
| left out white male from your rich and powerful. It took
| amendments to get past white and male.
| boroboro4 wrote:
| While it's true US was quite good on equality amongst this
| particular group. What we have now is quite different from
| it.
| arwhatever wrote:
| Our culture is an unfortunate nexus between strong contract
| enforcement and weak consumer protections.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Sure it is. Corporations are people too and laws like these
| take away their freedoms!
| postalrat wrote:
| I should be able to go into my bank or card service online. View
| a list of all my subscriptions. Click on a subscription (or
| select all). And cancel.
|
| If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be
| switching immediately.
| LiamPowell wrote:
| Simply move to Australia, all the major banks here offer this
| service: https://payto.com.au/
|
| Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum,
| especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.
| saulpw wrote:
| I use privacy.com for this.
|
| (Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)
| gblargg wrote:
| I wasn't able to jump through their hoops to sign up. They
| wanted my bank login, which I will absolutely not give to
| anyone. I tried a debit card but that also failed.
| missedthecue wrote:
| I had a recurring charge on my Capital One credit card and
| canceled it from my Capital One app. The next month, the charge
| went through again and they proactively gave me an account
| credit equal to the charged amount, with an emailed apology.
| I'm not sure why they couldn't cancel it, or if it will go
| through again this month, but it surprised me!
| nico wrote:
| I had a subscription with an account that I couldn't access
| anymore, and there wasn't any other way to cancel
|
| So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund
| me, but then the company would charge me again for the
| subscription
|
| This went on for several months. At some point the card
| expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and
| somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription
| to my new card, even though I couldn't even access my account
|
| It was a couple of years ago, and I don't remember how I
| finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see
| the charges "jump" through different cards. Especially given
| that usually any service that I don't want cancelled, gets
| immediately cancelled if my card on file expires
| __david__ wrote:
| Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that
| your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new
| card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card
| or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently
| without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent
| activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on
| my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so
| the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new
| card.
| pimterry wrote:
| The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all
| (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details
| to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then
| get swapped for a token which can be used to process
| transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this
| one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card
| details) and then future transactions all just use the
| token.
|
| When your card details change, all issued tokens generally
| stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card
| is basically an initial authentication process for the
| account, it's not really the payment method.
| wobfan wrote:
| Not gonna lie, I actually have canceled many service because of
| this single reason. If I get the feeling they want to hide
| these options specifically to keep me in a subscription, I
| immediately feel the urge to cancel even more, and also it
| gives me the feeling that the service itself is obviously,
| objectively, not good enough that they can just be honest and
| offer a easy cancel option - because they fear that too many
| people would.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial
| but sorry to tell you that "most" people is "forgot" they
| sign up something and not open it in years
|
| that's happen more often than you think
|
| also financial illiterate is real
| LoganDark wrote:
| > You are absolute minority that conscious about your
| financial
|
| Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single
| monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in
| the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future
| expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying
| for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a
| while. At least one subscription I've canceled and
| restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use
| it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.
|
| I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction
| into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my
| finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of
| charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for
| example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was
| purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well
| as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without
| having to look at each individual order). It's also faster
| to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since
| I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS
| verification every single time I log in no matter what.
| bombcar wrote:
| Sir, sorry to inform, but you do this:
|
| > I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction
| into
|
| You are a minority in a minority that tracks at all! ;)
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Deep deep minority. I'm similar to you, in that every
| dollar going in or out gets tracked and categorized, but
| due to a medical emergency I recently started helping an
| elderly family member with their finances (logistically,
| not monetarily) and was astounded that they just can't
| identify what the destination is for half (by value) of
| the money going out of their bank account (we're working
| on it...).
| gmd63 wrote:
| The issue is that many folks rely on and even manufacture
| financial illiteracy as part of their "business"
|
| It's extremely easy to give people what they want: a quick
| way to cancel a subscription. It should be criminal to
| deliberately hide that action behind phone calls etc.
| babyshake wrote:
| You can use privacy.com as another commenter has written. But
| one catch is I believe you can be on the hook for subscriptions
| where your card no longer works but you haven't cancelled your
| subscription. So they can send you invoices and even send it to
| collections. Although I strongly feel that at least for
| transactions of a sufficiently small size (normal retail
| subscriptions) cancelling your card should be legally
| considered sufficient enough for voiding your future
| subscription. I'm open to hearing counter arguments but I think
| the consumer shouldn't have to jump through even the smallest
| of hoops setup by vendors in order to indicate that they are no
| longer interested in future transactions.
| vincenzothgreat wrote:
| use an alias with an alias email, the Privacy.com card will
| accept any name and address. Never had any sort of issue in
| all the years using them
| venkat223 wrote:
| This type of activity is happening with Amazon Netflix and
| other medias also with various E-Commerce sites Apple
| particularly is asking for all particulars train to debit
| after the expiry of the period but is not allowing
| cancellation properly as the bandwth work remains down in
| many many areas sporadically we are not able to cancel at
| will.This is a user unfriendly activity which is monopolistic
| or coercive.People will lose faith in digitization slowly
| anonzzzies wrote:
| I always try via official means, but, failing that, I just
| cancel the (virtual) card. I have been threatened a lot that
| if I do that, my first born will be punished etc but of
| course nothing ever happens. I don't live in the US though.
| advisedwang wrote:
| What about subscriptions where you agreed to a long-term
| subscription (e.g. for a discounted rate)?
| koiueo wrote:
| Those are usually charged once per agreed period (never seen
| it any other way)
| kalleboo wrote:
| Adobe is an example where a yearly discounted subscription
| is billed monthly
| rat9988 wrote:
| They'll have to change their model or implement like a
| breakup fee depending of what would has been missed if
| you didn't have a discount.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Creating a "stop subscription" button within a
| bank/credit card interface but allowing companies to
| charge a breakup fee when that gets pressed seems like a
| recipe for a lot of people to get whacked by big breakup
| fees they didn't know about.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Cell phone plans often charge monthly but can be years long
| contracts.
| sebbadk wrote:
| I work for a company called Subaio that does exactly that, but
| it only works because EU (and some other countries) consumer
| protection laws requires that companies have to let us cancel
| subscriptions. So we're mostly working with european banks for
| now.
|
| The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at
| least as easy as signing up.
| average_r_user wrote:
| Could you point me to some European banks that integrate your
| product? My current bank doesn't have something similar, and
| I would like to have an option to view all my subscriptions
| at a glance
| ivape wrote:
| I'd have different wallets for everything if everything took
| Bitcoin. I guess I could do that with generated credit card
| numbers but haven't bothered with it.
| astatine wrote:
| You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based
| subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And
| every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank
| app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the
| bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next
| renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is
| required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility
| bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Yes there is https://www.privacy.com/ which gives you a unique
| virtual credit card per subscription, which you can cancel from
| the bank.
| dmoy wrote:
| That... doesn't necessarily work though?
|
| If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to
| collections.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to
| collections.
|
| Let them. I don't know why people let services abuse them
| like this.
| dmoy wrote:
| > I don't know why people let services abuse them like
| this.
|
| One reason is that the negative impact on your credit may
| end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars if
| you e.g. need to get a mortgage
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Ok? It's worth self-sacrifice to push back against
| practices hostile to humanity, like credit. But
| conforming over a fucking _gym membership_ just strikes
| me as spineless.
| codemac wrote:
| Nowadays a problem is the subscriptions are all multiplexed
| through apple, google, and amazon.
|
| I used to religiously use things like ynab, but now I need to
| find ways to export my amazon transactions, google play, etc.
| It's nearly impossible, and it makes me feel completely out
| of control.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Feels like a killer feature just waiting for someone to nail it
| properly
| colechristensen wrote:
| Any subscriptions that are paid through Apple Pay are like
| this. Apple also takes about a third of the money for the
| trouble.
|
| This is _not_ the same as using the Apple credit card for a
| subscription.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Here in the Netherlands, via my bank I can list all of my pre-
| approved transfers and block them. I'm pretty sure every bank
| here is required to support this. PayPal also has this feature.
|
| I recently had to cut down on expenses starting with extraneous
| subscriptions and charitable donations, of which I had dozens.
| Many ad a click-to-cancel or at least fill-out-a-form-to-cancel
| process, but some of them said 'call us'. Then I discovered
| that I could cut them all off from my side!
|
| I got a few 'hey your donation stopped' messages, and answered
| the first ones, but they all eventually went away.
| ldsd wrote:
| Be careful there. You can block further payments, but that
| won't necessarily cancel your subscription.
|
| You may still be responsible for the payment, and may need to
| pay collection fees as well at that point.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| In theory I can do this with standing orders / direct debit in
| the UK and there are some subscriptions where "cancelling the
| direct debit" is the official way to cancel. There should be no
| need for firms to reinvent recurring payments and store card
| details for their own ad hoc system. I don't know if it might
| disadvantage some people not familiar with managing direct
| debits though.
|
| However, many years ago, after an hour on hold failing to
| cancel Virgin ADSL I just cancelled the direct debit instead.
| They put a debt recovery firm on me! The direct debit was
| charged at the start of each billing period so it wasn't a non
| payment thing. I recall there used to be more indefensible
| "notice periods" for cancellation which were just pure scummy
| ways to force feed unwanted services but I don't think this had
| one.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| Revolut does that, at least in France. You can see and cancel
| both card subscriptions and direct debits
| rlpb wrote:
| Legally, this isn't sufficient. Your subscription contract is
| independent of your payment method. If you don't pay, that
| doesn't necessarily mean that your subscription is cancelled,
| and you could end up in court and lose.
|
| What is necessary is regulatory (or statutory) enforcement of
| easy, online notice of cancellation, without a company able to
| frustrate you giving them (and them recording and
| acknowledging) that notice.
| immibis wrote:
| This would be illegal in western countries.
| ghoul2 wrote:
| Thats how it works in India: all your "repeating" charge
| authorizations show up on a portal maintained by the issuing
| bank. All services that charge via these authorizations send an
| SMS alert before they debit the next charge. At any time, you
| can go into the portal and cancel any of these authorizations.
| No need to talk to the charging co at all, though still, best
| to first cancel from them. Jus that they know its trivial for
| the user to go and cancel the auth, so no one makes it
| difficult to cancel.
| whycome wrote:
| This is brilliant and simple. Canada could have this. Except
| the major telecommunications companies have a stranglehold on
| the govt and wouldn't be for it.
| tiahura wrote:
| The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. SS 57b-3(b)(1), which
| states that the agency " _shall_ issue a preliminary regulatory
| analysis" whenever it proposes a rule expected to have a
| significant economic impact.
|
| After its own ALJ found the rule's effect would exceed $100
| million annually, the FTC was obligated to publish an analysis of
| the "projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any
| other effects" and the effectiveness of alternatives, as required
| by SS 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
| Irongirl1 wrote:
| FYI: Everyone just use privacy.com
|
| It allows you to make virtual cards that are single use.
|
| So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will
| automatically decline.
|
| Until the powers that be gets its act together and stops allowing
| businesses to run all over us...this is the way.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Never heard of this; thanks for the tip!
| mrheosuper wrote:
| Great, another service that collects my purchase information.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| This is why I've never used these services.
| Shank wrote:
| > So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will
| automatically decline.
|
| I learned this the hard way with the New York Times doing this,
| but merchants can "force settle" a transaction if they want and
| it'll override the decline they get. This is a violation of the
| merchant agreement but companies do it anyway (like NYT did to
| me). Privacy isn't as bullet-proof as you would think.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| How could it override the decline if you cancel the card
| entirely in Privacy?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| It's an authorized recurring charge. Disabling the card
| only really works for sure on new charges. The only 'real'
| way to deauthorize it is to convince the merchant to do it
| for you. Every other method is just creating enough
| friction that you hope it will be too expensive for the
| merchant to fight back.
| reginald78 wrote:
| Yes, Capital One offers a similar virtual card service and
| when I read into the fine details it wasn't as useful as a
| thought. There were seemingly exceptions that could override
| spending limits for subscriptions and the control was mostly
| an illusion.
| KomoD wrote:
| Then you risk getting sent to collections instead.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I can use fake name and address with privacy cards
| bramhaag wrote:
| Is there anything like this that accepts EU customers?
| sensanaty wrote:
| Revolut has a disposable card feature. I'm sure there's some
| regular old school banks that have this as well, ING in the
| Netherlands does as far as I remember.
| anon191928 wrote:
| revolut and others still try to charge you, even if you
| cancel the VIRTUAL card. when you ask them, why and how
| they you do that, they say you have some sort of agreement
| for the subs. service and you need to end it on your own
| via them. Bank can't do that?? they said something like
| that to me. So they literally support the dark pattent
| side, not on your side obv.
| diggan wrote:
| Your bank might offer this already, just to check in case you
| haven't already. I think all banks I've had in Spain and
| Sweden has offered this feature within their web portal.
| pimterry wrote:
| Revolut along with quite a few other modern EU banks let you
| manage recurring billing directly - in Revolut I can pick any
| transaction in the app, click "Block future payments" and
| that vendor won't be able to bill my card again until I
| unblock them. That's separate from virtual/disposable cards -
| you can use your normal card and still block individual
| vendors.
|
| Honestly this seems like a pretty obvious core banking
| feature nowadays, I'm surprised it's not more widespread
| (even in the US - reliable cancellation features across all
| recurring card payments would surely make people more
| comfortable with subscriptions). Under the hood all banks
| (AFAIK) are handle recurring payments by issuing an
| authorization token at first purchase, and validating it on
| later transactions. Allowing customers to see the list of
| active tokens that were recently used and then revoke them
| explicitly seems like a no brainer.
| ourmandave wrote:
| _Privacy.com is a fintech platform offering virtual debit cards
| to secure online transactions. Based in Iceland and partnered
| with FDIC-insured banks, the service allows users to control
| card usage through pausing, unpausing, or closing. Privacy.com
| prioritizes security through firewalls, encryption, and PCI DSS
| compliance._
| blendergeek wrote:
| > Privacy.com prioritizes security through firewalls,
| encryption, and PCI DSS compliance.
|
| That line of cyber security mumbo jumbo does not inspire
| confidence
| crazygringo wrote:
| Then it just gets sent to collections, and worsens your credit
| score, so your next car loan or mortgage has a higher interest
| rate.
|
| You have to actually resolve the issue with the company
| charging you, and do a chargeback if necessary which requires
| submitting evidence. It sucks, but virtual numbers don't make
| your bills go away.
| rsanek wrote:
| unless the value is quite high it's unlikely the bill will
| actually get sent to collections. even if it does, you can
| negotiate fairly easily with the collection company to pay
| less than the original amount.
| Irongirl1 wrote:
| I think it was 30 years ago now, but I could be off by a few.
| My mother "insisted" on me signing up for an infomercial
| product for her...I offered to buy it outright (it was in
| stores for less than the _deal_ they were offering and
| deliver it personally) she declined and kept insisting. I did
| so and signed up for _1_ shipment. They charged me for months
| afterwards and put my checking account, to which the card was
| tied into overdraft and refused to refund. I was lucky
| because I was at a small bank which still had personal
| bankers and she was kind and reasonable. She reversed the
| charges for me and got me my money back. That company stole
| my grocery money and didn 't blink an eye.
|
| Again: this was at least 30 years ago. Nothing was changed.
| The companies that take advantage are still taking advantage
| and the government is facilitating theft, fraud and tons of
| stress on those who can ill afford it. It is a major issue
| also for seniors who constantly get trapped in this crap.
| They tie people up with confusing forms and jargon and make
| it impossible. They have no shame. Check Rip-off Reports, if
| they are still allowed to exist, or webarchive...the stories
| are awful. It's past time for people to be able to stop this
| thru their cards or tactical action. The cost to pay a lawyer
| to fight this kind of crap also falls on the person who
| files-think travel if they are out of state...most of these
| companies are based miles away and know that people can't
| afford to fight them.
| db48x wrote:
| For those of you wondering what the actual decision says:
| <https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/25/07/243137P.pdf>
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Spectrum (cable/telephone/internet) kept me on the phone line for
| 30 minutes as i tried to cancel.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| Ask my girlfriend about my phone call with Time Warner (pre
| Spectrum) where I said the words "I want to cancel cable TV but
| keep internet" about two dozen times to 3 different people.
| RankingMember wrote:
| The need to repeat yourself over and over as you get
| transferred multiple times is maddening.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| I wonder who's on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
|
| Bush 41: 2
|
| Bush 43: 6
|
| Obama: 1
|
| Trump: 4
|
| _oh_
| unethical_ban wrote:
| If we had a Congress who knew what Signal, e-mail, or credit
| cards were, then we may get actual legislation protecting
| consumer rights.
| bogwog wrote:
| The average age of congress members is 58 years old, which is 6
| years older than the first cellphone call.
|
| Wikipedia lists 4 Congress members that have died in office of
| "unspecified natural causes" since 2022. Aka they literally
| died of old age while in office.
|
| I don't think they know what Signal, e-mail, or credit cards
| are.
| supertrope wrote:
| It's not a matter of not being tech savvy. It's the lobbyists
| who schmooze with them and the campaign donors who give them
| money.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Dark pattern galore
| eleveriven wrote:
| Honestly, it's wild that something as common-sense as "make
| canceling as easy as signing up" is this hard to implement
| oblio wrote:
| It's not hard to implement, in the sense of "hard to implement
| software feature".
|
| It's hard because businesses don't want cancellation to be
| easy, as they lose money. A lot of people forget to cancel or
| just can't be bothered for a long time, especially if
| cancellation is hard.
|
| And yes, it's as predatory as it sounds.
|
| It's basically the financialization of business, as some point
| one of the few ways towards "growth" is nickel-and-diming
| everyone you can.
| beezlewax wrote:
| I've used a learning platform called Brilliant in the past. The
| cancellation process was so convoluted that it was impossible to
| cancel the account. Dark patterns and confusing language.
|
| They refused to refund me and after I thought I'd cancelled and I
| had to run a charge back from my bank.
|
| This is nefarious behaviour on their part and consumers need to
| be protected from it.
| fuzztester wrote:
| Do you mean brilliant.org ?
| beezlewax wrote:
| Yes
| trueismywork wrote:
| In contrast in EU, I sent an email to my service to cancel and
| they forgot to cancel. I just sent them another email with
| proof of email and they realised they missed the old one and
| canceled retroactively and refunded money to my account.
| pbh101 wrote:
| This has not been my experience cancelling eu services.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Care to expand beyond a meaningless statement? What has
| your experience been?
| beezlewax wrote:
| I am in the EU.
| injidup wrote:
| I call bullshit.
| https://help.brilliant.org/en/articles/741701-how-can-i-canc...
| whycome wrote:
| What happens when you click the link in that article?
|
| "You can cancel your subscription at any time by clicking the
| "cancel" button on your subscription settings page, here."
|
| It leads to a 404. With the benefit of the doubt, I'm not
| logged in -- but it shouldn't lead to a 404.
| beezlewax wrote:
| Their help says on thing while Their app another. At least
| that was my experience.
|
| They refused to refund me when it was clear I'd tried to
| cancel.
|
| I'd even gotten an onscreen message saying something like
| "your subscription will be cancelled".
| apwell23 wrote:
| i only subscribe to services through app store on my iphone.
| even if costs me premium.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I use privacy dot com cards I can turn off in a single click
| apwell23 wrote:
| doesn't stop it from being sent to collections.
|
| wtf are ppl downvoting this. i had it happen to me.
| derwiki wrote:
| I guess not; but I also use Privacy.com cards and have
| never ended up in collections when I pause a card to
| cancel a service.
| rsanek wrote:
| once something is in collections, you can negotiate to
| pay a fraction of the original price. it's actually
| harder to do so before then.
|
| or, you can just not pay even through collections. rarely
| does it impact credit score (much). lots of kinds of debt
| even legally can't (eg <$500 medical debt)
| apwell23 wrote:
| > you can negotiate to pay a fraction of the original
| price.
|
| what gives you the negotiating power ? they can simply
| dock you on your credit report. thats what comcast did to
| me. they didn't care about negotiating
| fuomag9 wrote:
| That service doesn't exist in Europe unfortunately, I have
| to use Revolut for that
| ethagnawl wrote:
| I learned the hard way that they also bill annually by default.
| As soon as my family's week long trial was up, they billed me
| for an entire year. Yes, it's on me for not reading the T&C (I
| was hastily trying to find an activity for my kid which was
| somewhat constructive ...) but I just don't understand this
| race-to-the-bottom/rent-seeking behavior. There was once a
| possibility that I'd renew our membership and recommend it to
| other families because we got so much out of the service but
| that's not happening now -- quite the opposite, in fact.
| beezlewax wrote:
| It's not really on you though.. they word things in a way
| that'd makes it less than obvious what you're signing up for.
| Then they make cancelling difficult.
|
| It all done in bad faith and an instant black mark against
| any company.
| guelo wrote:
| Of course it's going to cost more than $100 million if they have
| stop stealing from us.
|
| Corporate Republicans hate red tape and regulation for business
| but love it for starngling government and the poor (they just
| added huge onoreous red tape to medicaid and food stamp
| recipients because they absolutely hate their fellow americans).
| pjmlp wrote:
| The consumer protection laws are so bad the other side of
| Atlantic.
|
| Most European countries, have their own version of consumer
| protection agencies, usually any kind of complaint gets sorted
| out, even if takes a couple months.
|
| If they fail for whatever reason, there is still the top European
| one.
|
| Most of the time I read about FTC, it appears to side with the
| wrong guys.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily
| in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection
| in the US.
| scrubs wrote:
| And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably
| leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not
| need either.
|
| The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is
| common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions
| control in equal parts to accountability.
|
| It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly
| we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any
| future inflection point.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I think the century of American dominance is probably over.
| Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional
| government, maybe not. I think either way our position in
| the world order is already diminished and will steadily
| diminish further. I can see a future where America is a
| strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules
| over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| And who would supersede the states by picking up the
| mantle?
| sneak wrote:
| The US wasn't the dominant superpower due to cooperation
| or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure
| technological force.
|
| Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at
| NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
|
| The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch
| vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was
| willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to
| geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which
| it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
|
| Who else is able to commit such technological progress to
| being able to command the world order by edict?
|
| China, perhaps, but I don't see the next TSMC or SpaceX
| or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the
| name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass
| scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to
| geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with
| perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an
| alternate or close second.)
|
| It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of
| the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world
| order was really very very kind to the USA.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| > It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of
| the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world
| order was really very very kind to the USA.
|
| And why do you think it couldn't remain that way?
| Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far
| closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be
| that the output suddenly stops?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| well in the past year, we have stopped funding science in
| the US, arrested and deported thousands of foreign
| students here legally, removing the pipeline for the
| smartest people in the world to move to the US and start
| world changing companies, and started a trade war with
| the entire world, making American businesses much less
| competitive at buying/selling goods internationally.
|
| to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin
| were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did
| exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing
| people in El Salvador
| sneak wrote:
| The US used to be run by people with the ability to think
| strategically, or by people who listened to educated
| people who could think strategically. The current US
| leadership either allows or endorses the capricious whims
| of an TV-educated idiot to consistently undermine
| national security and the most fundamental national
| interests. The complete and total mismanagement of the
| covid pandemic stands as a perfect example of the scale
| of the positively massive amount of preventable
| destruction being wrought presently. That's just one out
| of many.
|
| Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are
| flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is
| becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of
| control rogue agencies are kidnapping people
| indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are
| falling precipitously, and a greater and greater
| percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much
| less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful
| primary education). You simply won't have the talent
| pools required to do hard things at scale after a while.
| This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability
| of the economics of supply chains, as incoherent economic
| policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a
| monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in
| advance.
|
| You need some basic levels of functioning society and
| infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions
| and structures and companies and technology. The US has
| been attacking its own society's foundations for decades,
| and has recently accelerated the pace substantially.
|
| I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a
| generation, certainly not continued technological
| innovation.
| bluGill wrote:
| It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing
| not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small
| areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if
| they wanted - be more powerful than the US. However they
| have never seen any point - they mostly (not entirely)
| agree with the US and so it would be a waste of their
| limited time to do that instead of what they were doing
| instead.
| bitcurious wrote:
| > It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing
| not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small
| areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if
| they wanted - be more powerful than the US.
|
| Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US
| and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped
| their independence. The Europeans didn't _choose_ to be
| on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance
| of their own making.
| bluGill wrote:
| In the 1950s that was true. By 1960 it was already
| changing. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s
| Europe was plenty rebuilt enough that they could have
| redirected their efforts to opposing the US, but they
| mostly choose not to. Sure the US had a head start, but
| they have plenty of power. China is moving in the
| direction of opposing the US in the world, and seeing
| results.
| rdm_blackhole wrote:
| > The Europeans didn't choose to be on the American side,
| they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
|
| Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden
| joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-
| European military alliance, they could have done so but
| instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.
|
| Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European
| countries decided to basically gut their military budgets
| and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the
| fact that until very recently only a small fraction of
| the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget
| targets.
|
| De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because
| he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be
| gave up on the concept of military independence.
| rfrey wrote:
| Corporations. European politics can be captured by large
| corporations the same way the US has been. It was
| unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations
| would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere
| as well.
| ptero wrote:
| As an American, I would welcome the world without
| American domination. Or without any single country
| domination for that matter. Competition of systems is
| good for the world.
|
| It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia
| state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road
| for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it
| goes up as many systems and alliances around the world
| that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| If it's not America it will be China and I don't think
| you want to live in that world.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| With their population pyramid I doubt it'd stay that way
| for long, though.
| dinfinity wrote:
| Depends on how far down the US is going to slide. It's
| sadly well underway to become much, much worse than China
| is (or will become).
| scrubs wrote:
| It's not clear to me that China is batting that well. I
| do not wish bad upon the Chinese citizenry, and China has
| done well in its own day since the 1960s.
|
| But don't forget at the same time where China was during
| the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions,
| nor the state control over the Chinese populace.
|
| Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-
| democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling
| there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not
| think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK,
| for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one
| country" rule the CPP landed on.
|
| Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be
| Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into
| wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its
| mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit
| different. It's got internal issues of employment, real
| estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full.
|
| My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on
| stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the
| US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the
| US Congress has become an institutional zero especially
| since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the
| Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of
| course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter
| to keep in mind.
|
| China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense,
| but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in
| fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that
| if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will
| have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will
| not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is
| damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP
| will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
| rapind wrote:
| > US Congress has become an institutional zero especially
| since Gingrich.
|
| This and Citizens United.
| rfrey wrote:
| It doesn't have to be China or any other country. It can
| be corporations who move to capture the governments in
| other countries the way they've done in the US.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Why does it have to be China and why does it have to be
| any one country? Why can't it be China, EU, and the US
| all having about the same influence?
|
| But besides, with the rightward, populist/religious nut
| tilt of the US and corporations being able to bribe the
| President to get what they want without repercussions
| (Disney, Paramount, Meta, X, etc), I don't see how the US
| is much better. All of the branches of government are
| giving power to the President that should be theirs.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| Because there will always be someone with an advantage
| over the others.
|
| Equilibriums in geopolitics are inherently unstable,
| states naturally compete for their own self-interest. No
| state will be willingly co-equal with another unless some
| actor with greater power forces it into that position.
|
| To your last point, given the state of the US, it would
| probably be better for the world if the EU were on top at
| the moment. But they will not be.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| While I've only personally spent a day in an EU country
| so far - a day trip from London to Paris last month (more
| coming over the years) - I would much rather see European
| values exported to the world than US values - lack of
| universal healthcare, gun violence, corporate takeover of
| government, anti-vax, anti-science nut cases, etc.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I would too. If we agree that monopolies are bad for
| private industry, why isn't it just as bad as having one
| world power. I think Trump and MAGA are uninformed
| idiots. But they have caused the EU to start building up
| their own military industry, countries to focus more on
| their own research and decouple themselves from the US. I
| can't see how that's a bad thing.
|
| The US has given me all sorts of opportunities I wouldn't
| have anywhere else in the world as a native born
| citizens. I plan to extract as much as I can from it and
| keep my eyes open to retiring somewhere else.
|
| I continuously vote and advocate for policies like
| universal healthcare, pre-K education, etc. But what are
| you going to do when voters vote for politicians thst ars
| against their own interests - getting rid of FEMA when
| the states that need it the most are Republican,
| Medicaid, etc.
|
| This isn't a pie in the sky shrill "I'm leaving the US
| tomorrow". But my wife and I already did the digital
| nomad thing domestically for a year starting in late 2022
| and going forward starting next year, we are going to be
| spending more time out of the country in US time zones
| while I work remotely starting with Costa Rica.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a
| short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't
| translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even
| protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted
| by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
|
| This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and
| large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of
| left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left
| political success and therefore the far right backlash is
| deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first
| place.
| xphilter wrote:
| They're talking about those times we let women vote,
| implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow.
| Really overshot lol.
| Arubis wrote:
| When we "overshot left" it was by electing a centrist
| cishet man who identified as Christian and had different
| colored skin from the prior presidents.
|
| Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
| malfist wrote:
| We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a
| Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the
| right and just stripped health care away from 12 million
| people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the
| rich
| thrance wrote:
| Surely you're joking, right? The current administration
| building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12
| millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't
| be ridiculous.
| fuzzy_biscuit wrote:
| I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about,
| so I'll bite.
|
| Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality
| getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public
| servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been
| mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections.
| Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in
| which case I agree.
| nyeah wrote:
| "Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives
| insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed
| it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has).
| They claimed those benefits would be shared by all
| Americans (which listen to them now).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
| HybridCurve wrote:
| The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital
| flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of
| countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to
| collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages
| demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and
| further deregulation, which often made things worse. And
| let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke
| the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a
| speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a
| core neoliberal policy. Just like all politics: never trust
| the meaning or identity of something derived from it's
| headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first
| lies we are told.
| claytongulick wrote:
| Did you read TFA? This had nothing to do with neoliberalism
| or whatever.
|
| Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two
| republican appointees who voted against it.
|
| They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their
| own rule making process, they believed it would be struck
| down by the courts because of this.
|
| They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but
| held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left
| unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at
| their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule.
|
| All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow
| the law and their own defined process for rule making.
|
| They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it
| the right way.
|
| While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this
| was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly,
| and hopefully next time will follow the law when making
| rules.
| delfinom wrote:
| Not the FTC's fault.
|
| The problem is US congress has not functioned for 2 decades.
| They no longer pass actual laws. This means the FTC is stuck
| reinterpreting their existing powers to try and squeeze out
| regulation that they can but that's it.
| sneak wrote:
| If the FTC can't do what the FTC is supposed to do, then that
| is the FTC's fault for continuing to exist. It's unfit for
| purpose and should be shut down.
| xphilter wrote:
| The ftc isn't supposed to create laws though. I tend to
| overshoot on the consumer's side, but the ftc is
| overstepping with actions like this. There should be a law
| passed on this point and then ftc can enforce. Or ftc can
| sue based on existing law and let courts buy their
| interpretation.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > There should be a law passed on this point
|
| Right; there was. We'd refer to that as the "enabling
| act" by which Congress delegates regulatory lawmaking
| authority to the FTC.
|
| > The FTC isn't supposed to create laws
|
| You have deeply misunderstood US federal regulatory law.
|
| > Or FTC can sue based on existing law
|
| Yes; that's the idea. Regulations are law.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Even if we were to accept your premise (if broken, throw
| out), it's still _Congress_ that decides whether the FTC
| exists or not.
| evilduck wrote:
| The FTC have no say in choosing to exist or not exist, or
| what laws are passed that they are supposed to enforce. In
| some cases, an agency intentionally choosing to not carry
| out their duties would even be breaking the law and subject
| to penalty or punishment. How the FTC goes about
| interpreting their duties and then the court system
| correcting their behavior when they disagree or misbehave
| is the system working as intended. If they don't have laws
| to interpret for an issue though, that's a legislative
| problem.
|
| The real question is why isn't congress doing their job?
| They control both the existence and funding of the FTC and
| additionally the laws the FTC are tasked with interpreting
| and enforcing. If congress is unfit for purpose they should
| be replaced.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| While it's correct to assert the FTC can't choose to
| ignore its enabling act, it's false to say: 1) the FTC
| has no say in the laws they are supposed to enforce 2)
| Congress controls the laws the FTC is tasked with
| enforcing.
|
| As to 1, the FTC writes the laws it enforces. These laws
| are called regulations. As to 2, of course Congress could
| write laws that have to be enforced, but when it comes to
| regulatory agencies, Congress does quite the opposite.
| Instead of writing the laws concerning trade, Congress
| wrote an enabling act delegating this authority to the
| agency.
|
| Calling for the replacement of a branch of government
| without understanding any of this would be avoidable with
| a better educational system.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >Calling for the replacement of a branch of government
| without understanding any of this would be avoidable with
| a better educational system.
|
| I could be wrong, but IIUC, what GP meant by "If congress
| is unfit for purpose they should be replaced."
|
| Is that we should vote the _current_ congress-critters
| out of office and replace them with different ones -- who
| might actually do their job.
| mrtksn wrote:
| True but generally speaking American companies usually have
| much better customer service and better refund policies than
| European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners
| the market or has no viable alternatives.
|
| So maybe the American way of doing things can also work if a
| healthy competitive environment is preserved.
|
| The problem lately is that American companies have become
| monopolies and the formula firms extracting profits or stock
| hikes for the shareholders dictate that they screw the user up
| until barely legal territory.
|
| So maybe America can roll without consumer protection laws and
| agencies if they can fix the business environment.
|
| They just need to find a way out of enshittification, a process
| US companies perfected.
| mokash wrote:
| >True but generally speaking American companies usually have
| much better customer service and better refund policies than
| European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners
| the market or has no viable alternatives.
|
| this does not track with my experience
| mrtksn wrote:
| Any examples of American company having worse customer
| experience than European ones?
|
| I will give you 2 for the opposite: Amazon and Apple do no
| question asked refunds all the time. Much higher bar than
| European regulators require.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| To be honest I don't think they do "no question asked
| refunds" for the consumer's benefit -- probably more so
| that they don't have to devote customer support resources
| to handling all the return requests they get.
|
| I'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no
| questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large
| expensive items.
| Calvin02 wrote:
| Have you ever tried to return something bought at a
| clothing store? I made that mistake once in France.
|
| You're creating an absurd standard "repeatedly return
| large expensive items" but even every day things are way
| easier in the US.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Exactly. Europe's regulations are about the absolute
| bottom, not intended to be taken as the average
| experience.
|
| On average US companies are much better with customer
| experience. Of course until they corner you, then they
| may choose not to and then you have it worse than
| Europeans.
| vladms wrote:
| I think it's more about the type of store. I was with
| acquaintances returning clothes at high end stores
| (meaning: expensive) and service was great. I would not
| try that at a low end store (meaning: cheap).
|
| From my point of view processing a return costs the store
| money. If they don't make a high margin they will (try
| to) discourage it. If in US everywhere they are fine with
| it for me it means they make higher margins everywhere.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >probably more so that they don't have to devote customer
| support resources to handling all the return
|
| Sounds like a win-win then.
|
| This isn't zero sum. Just because it's better for the
| company doesn't mean it's worse for the consumer.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Sure, but just because it's also pleasant for the
| consumer as a byproduct doesn't mean you can attribute
| their actions to that cause, e.g. this doesn't make them
| altruistic.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Isn't it best if you don't need refunds all the time ?
|
| Ordering on French consumer shops I got exactly what I
| asked for, at a reasonable price in a reasonable time.
|
| Product descriptions are actually helpful and there is
| little risk to get some fake product instead.
|
| Amazon's customer support was incredibly helpful, but
| that's not what I want to pay for.
|
| FWIW, I moved to AliExpress for the stuff I'm ok to
| gamble with.
| oritsnile wrote:
| The same is true for Europe. I've never had an issue
| returning items on Amazon, whether they're for personal
| or business use (where you don't have the right to return
| items). The same goes for local and European chains.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >Any examples of American company having worse customer
| experience than European ones?
|
| Xfinity comes to mind. The last time I bought a new
| modem, I had to basically yell 'cancel my account' over
| and over again until I finally got to speak to a living,
| breathing human, who could provision the modem for me.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Any examples of American company having worse customer
| experience than European ones?
|
| I would say things like cable and internet companies, as
| well as airlines. They are similarly frustrating in
| Europe but not to the extent that they are in the US and
| the difference comes down to better regulation.
|
| For that matter I would say the tech regulation
| environment probably benefits European consumers with
| stronger data privacy rights, and a 14-day right to
| withdraw from digital contracts.
| sensanaty wrote:
| In the Netherlands literally every single store has no
| questions asked refunds for up to a month. Not that I
| have to do it often, but for example Coolblue and Bol
| both offer free returns within a month. Pretty much any
| webstore I have literally _ever_ used has the same refund
| policies. Not to mention that the topic of this thread is
| already in-place EU wide, so there 's an obvious win
| there too.
| lossolo wrote:
| > Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the
| time
|
| I'm not sure where you're getting your information about
| the EU from, but I can return any item I order online
| within 14 days, and then I have another 14 days to send
| it back, no questions asked, no need to give any reason.
| Some companies even offer 30 to 90 days, but the 14 + 14
| days is the legal minimum.
| okanat wrote:
| In Germany companies have to have 14 days, no questions asked
| return for products and services ordered online. If they
| don't accept it, you can report to a consumer protection
| agency and sue the company.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| This is everywhere in Europe
|
| So it is sometimes better to buy stuff online, because the
| reasoning is that you haven't seen or tried them, but when
| you buy it in a physical shop, then you were aware what you
| bough and can't claim that you couldn't check the colour of
| a thing or how it fit you or whatever else reason you can
| think of.
| aqme28 wrote:
| Absolutely. I don't know if it's the FTC or FCC, but the moment
| I swap back to my American SIM card on trips to the US, I start
| getting spam texts that I cannot get rid of. Meanwhile I get
| absolutely zero of these with my European number.
| rafram wrote:
| People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they? WhatsApp spam
| is very pervasive, though.
| xcf_seetan wrote:
| Actually I am european and use sms a lot. Dont even have
| WhatsApp installed... :)
| xxs wrote:
| >People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they
|
| Europe is very far from being a single entity. Yet, SMS/RCS
| is popular enough, and in many countries WhatsApp is non-
| existent.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Everyone has SMS, they may also have WhatsApp, Facebook
| Messenger or whatever is popular in any given market, but
| everyone has SMS.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I don't think I get any corporate communication from
| WhatsApp it is all SMS. For chatting WhatsApp is popular,
| but companies just send SMS.
| sabellito wrote:
| Consumer protection laws are mostly fine in Brazil and Uruguay,
| and I'd bet also on more countries on the other side of the
| Atlantic.
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| A Civil law (Roman law) system might have upheld the FTC's
| click-to-cancel rule in spite of missteps because it serves the
| public good. But in common law, process is king--as is
| protecting individual rights (including the rights of shady
| marketers.)
| anticensor wrote:
| In certain civil law systems such as Turkey, the process is
| still king, in fact more important than in the US because of
| the preponderance of positive law in civil law.
| Tainnor wrote:
| It's definitely better in Europe, but certain courts and DPAs
| (especially the Irish one) are unfortunately known to be
| incredibly business friendly.
| mindwork wrote:
| At the same time European laws got whole internet littered with
| "Accept cookies" banners
| okanat wrote:
| This is a persistent stupid take but many HN readers are also
| on the wrong side of the consumer protection. Those startups
| don't make money out of thin air eh?
|
| Once again. The full consumer protection would be banning
| behavior-based advertisement completely, which I would
| welcome. GDPR is striking a balance. It forces the companies
| to ask if they are going to collect data and use it in any
| other purpose from delivering the information / service.
|
| Almost all of the web is feeding data into Google's ad and
| statistics services which are used to profile people and
| completely out of scope. That's the minimum. Worser services
| feed your data into every single PII broker. If you don't
| collect such data, no banners are necessary. If you need an
| address and an email to just ship a product, you need 0
| cookie banners. The websites can also do geo-fencing so you
| don't see any banners. They don't want to spend any money to
| engineers though.
|
| But no, it is EU's fault to create a balanced law. Companies
| should be violating you and your pricacy left and right.
| That's their right, isn't it.
| crims0n wrote:
| Plenty of well-meaning laws have unintended consequences.
| Intent does not absolve being the cause of the effect.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Sure, but the cookie law is a bad example of it.
| vkou wrote:
| This consequence is 100% intended to fuck with the UX of
| your website, if your business model is tracking users.
|
| And it accomplishes that goal. A lot of people on this
| forum are quite unhappy about it, but that's not because
| it's an unforeseen consequence.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The alternative would have been banning tracking and I don't
| think that would have happend. At least now you're being
| informed and have at least the perception of an option to
| opt-out.
|
| Had you truly preferred not being informed, not being allowed
| to opt-out?
| mindwork wrote:
| thats not the point I was answering.
|
| The point is that it's 2 sides of the coin under regulation
| vs over regulation. And no system is ideal on both sides of
| Atlantic
| t-writescode wrote:
| The standard "Accept Cookies" banner is, give or take,
| malicious compliance to the EU's cookie laws. For actually
| required things, it doesn't *need* to be a banner. Companies
| tend to use a standardized, third-party-powered "follow the
| EU law" tool that they get the ugly cookie banner. And even
| that banner's malicious compliance is under attack now
| because it takes too many steps to opt out.
|
| For things like sign-in, you barely have to mention the use
| of cookies on your website, because it's necessary. For
| things like items in an anonymous shopping cart, a simple
| "adding this item to the cart when you're not logged in will
| cause the item to be saved in a cookie so we can remember it
| later" would suffice.
|
| I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.
| devjab wrote:
| The cookie banner pop-ups are not compliance with the EU
| legislation, in fact, many of them are in direct violation of
| EU laws. If you were to give sites the benefit of doubt, they
| are doing it because they are copy pasting, but the reality
| is, that the law is that they can not track you without your
| concent and that they are not allowed to bother you. The fact
| that they do is likely malicious compliance to get you to
| blame the EU rather than their shitty tracking practices.
|
| Any site that doesn't have a single button click to ignore
| all cookies, breaks EU law. But to truly follow the law, you
| would have to go into a site setting on your own, and enable
| tracking. Which nobody would do.
| api wrote:
| Disputing charges through banks will become the way to cancel
| things.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Not really. Lots of people in this thread explain why not:
|
| - it's not foolproof as many of those cards will allow the
| merchant to override
|
| - their claim can get sent to collections and hurt your credit
| score
|
| - you can get canceled
|
| Seriously, if you cancel payment on a company, they'll never do
| business with you again, and when it's a large and difficult-
| to-do-without company it can hurt.
|
| Telling people to cancel payment to cancel is just bad advice
| that will hurt them.
|
| We really need strong regulation here. There is no substitute.
| everdrive wrote:
| One consequence here that people need to think about is that ALL
| subscription services should be viewed with suspicion. Once you
| sign up how much of your life will be deranged simply by trying
| to cancel the service. It's a hidden cost which shouldn't be
| forgotten.
| pona-a wrote:
| So there's a business argument for this regulation. If the
| consumers feel unsafe giving their credit cards to most
| companies, they'll spend less on subscription services in
| total, harming the industry more than they gain from milking
| zombie customers.
| whycome wrote:
| Is zombie customer an official term. And how much of their
| profits are from that sector? Is this like airlines over
| selling seats?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| zombie purchasers is the business model of basically every
| gym. they lose money on the people that actually show up.
| the money makers are the people who sign up for a
| membership, go once or twice and then forget to cancel (or
| purchased a full year at once)
| rsanek wrote:
| i mostly use Robinhood virtual cards for services now. if i
| want to cancel i just cancel the card.
| quitit wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why providers -hate- IAP
| subscriptions, even if the profit share was 0%, they'd still
| not be happy because with IAP it's just one click to cancel.
|
| It's not even a practice limited to "shady" companies, the New
| York Times would let you sign up online, but only cancel via a
| convoluted phone call with one of their subscription retainment
| reps.
|
| These days you're better off obtaining a credit card which lets
| you instantly block transactions. These companies with their
| b/s unsubscribe gauntlets aren't worth your time.
| cyral wrote:
| Well, the "one click" cancel is hidden deep in the settings
| app - and when customers contact us asking to cancel, they
| don't like to hear that we cannot cancel or refund them from
| our end. (Apple doesn't even provide a way to look up the
| customer. Most people don't understand that Apple is actually
| managing the entire billing process)
| SuperSandro2000 wrote:
| 3rd world country customer protection laws...
| ChoGGi wrote:
| I bet Trump will surely sign an executive order putting click to
| cancel into place any day now.
| John23832 wrote:
| What consumer does this serve at all? What citizen does this
| serve at all?
|
| This only serves to allow firms to erect effort barriers to keep
| rent seeking fro their customers. The "gotcha" that the Khan FTC
| didn't "follow the rules making process" is parallel
| construction.
| thrance wrote:
| It serves the current administration's in-group: the ultra-
| wealthy.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| Got a surprise for you if you think any admins in group isn't
| the ultra wealthy
| XorNot wrote:
| "this paper cut is exactly the same as sticking my arm in a
| wood chipper, which is why I chose the latter..."
| platevoltage wrote:
| "It's like a uniparty bruh"
| pessimizer wrote:
| Actually Republicans are like demons and Democrats are
| like angels, which is why their policies are so distinct.
| I am very sophisticated.
| thrance wrote:
| Can you seriously compare the administration building
| concentration camps, cutting medicare for 12 millions
| people (effectively killing a lot of them) and dooming
| America's future through insane spending to the previous
| administration?
|
| I do not hold the democrats in my heart but claiming
| they're "both equally bad" is absolutely ludicrous.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Why would the ultra-wealthy be this administration's in-
| group? Trump won voters with under 100K income, while Harris
| won those over 100K.[0] Among high-net-worth individuals,
| Harris had a 10 point lead among those with $1-5mm in net
| worth and a ~2 point lead with those >$5m, according to the
| only polling I could find that specifically targeted high-
| net-worth individuals.[1] It's possible that the "ultra-
| wealthy" buck this trend, but I haven't seen any data that
| suggest such a thing.
|
| [0] https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024
|
| [1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-
| politic...
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Trying to extrapolate the behavior of people with $100
| billion from the behavior of people with $5 million is
| clearly nonsense. That's as big of a difference as between
| someone who makes $20 million per year and someone at the
| global extreme poverty line of $2.66 per day.
|
| Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were
| personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.
| sssilver wrote:
| More like "five richest people in the US according to
| their tax returns". Nobody has counted the money of the
| Saudi Prince, the president of Russia, and a few dozen
| other characters like these.
|
| Intuitively it feels like their wealth would eclipse Elon
| Musk.
| rayiner wrote:
| Courts don't make decisions on whether executive rules are told
| or bad, serve consumers or not. The main oversight they have is
| ensuring compliance with procedural rules and statutory
| technicalities.
| Devasta wrote:
| That hasn't been true this century at the very least.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, I take a dim view of the courts in general these days.
| However, this looks black and white. The FTC was trying to
| rush in the change before Trump took office and that
| backfired on them.
|
| Now, the rule is good. There is no reason why the current FTC
| shouldn't implement it. It literally harms nobody except for
| businesses addicted to dark patterns.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _There is no reason why the current FTC shouldn 't
| implement it. It literally harms nobody except for
| businesses addicted to dark patterns._
|
| Well:
|
| > _The FTC issued the proposal in March 2023 and voted 3-2
| to approve the rule in October 2024, with Republican
| Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson voting
| against it. Ferguson is now chairman of the FTC, which has
| consisted only of Republicans since Trump fired the two
| Democrats who remained after Khan 's departure._
| duped wrote:
| Upon plain inspection, this is untrue.
| dontlikeyoueith wrote:
| > Courts don't make decisions on whether executive rules are
| told or bad, serve consumers or not
|
| This is just an obvious lie.
|
| They're not supposed to, but they obviously do. Usually
| against common citizens' interest.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| The standard capitalist response would be, it serves the
| consumer of a service who wouldn't be willing to pay more for
| the additional guarantee of click-to-cancel.
|
| It doesn't seem that farfetched to me to imagine two sites
| offering equivalent services, one at $5/month and the other at
| $6/month, with the only difference being the $6/month site
| offers click to cancel. This dollar price difference is often
| the difference between the life and death of a company.
|
| A harsher way of phrasing it would be this serves the consumer
| who actually pays attention to their bills. I've had a cheap
| gym membership sitting around for a few months that I haven't
| gone to. I don't want to go to the effort of cancelling it,
| because that's hard. My sloth subsidizes the gym goers who
| actually do use the service every day and pay less than they
| otherwise would for the privilege. Poor, lazy, stupid people
| like me should still be given the option to spend our money in
| poor, lazy, stupid ways.
| cogman10 wrote:
| The issue with this argument is that services follow industry
| standards. You can't find me a single example of two
| competing services, one with click to cancel and the other
| without, in the same industry.
|
| Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing.
| If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.
|
| The other issue is that if these things are guaranteed in
| law, they have a nasty habit of simply disappearing. A great
| example of that is ads in paid streaming services. In the
| beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu
| came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That
| started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms
| where now they all do ads for paid content. They are even
| toying with not allowing a higher payment to opt out of ads
| (which will likely come).
|
| Click to cancel would be the same way. You might sign up for
| something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely
| nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that
| option. Just like nothing has stopped companies from
| requiring phone calls, at the right time, in the right manor,
| and with a 20 step Q/A retention process. Bad enough that you
| can now pay people to sit through retention processes to
| cancel for you.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| > You can't find me a single example of two competing
| services, one with click to cancel and the other without,
| in the same industry.
|
| We can get pretty close. Take Adobe versus Affinity. Same
| industry, very similar product suites, but totally
| different pricing strategies, and Adobe makes cancellation
| much more annoying.
|
| There are plenty of examples of this if you keep your eyes
| open. I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't have an exact
| example to give you is because I'm under NDA and I don't
| watch most consumer retail enough to know.
|
| >Companies pay attention to what their competitors are
| doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along
| with it.
|
| Tacit collusion becomes exponentially more difficult to
| maintain in any market with more than a handful of players.
| A different pricing strategy is one of the easiest ways to
| counterposition against an incumbent there is. It's part of
| how SaaS toppled bubble wrap CDs in the first place.
|
| That can be lower pricing with the same model, or it can be
| a one time purchase versus a subscription, or it can be a
| hard to cancel but very cheap subscription over a very
| expensive one time purchase.
|
| > In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads.
| But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower
| tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming
| platforms where now they all do ads for paid content.
|
| People are more willing to pay $10 per month with ads than
| $12 per month without ads. I don't find that especially
| shocking. The market figures out what people actually want,
| not what people say they want.
|
| Say it were not so. Then we would see some Netflix
| renegades start a new streaming platform that is Ad Free
| Again(tm) and only a tiny bit more expensive than the
| competitors, and most consumers would switch. It's not
| impossible, but I haven't seen that happen yet.
|
| >You might sign up for something with a click to cancel
| feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a
| company from quietly removing that option.
|
| If I care enough about the feature and this price
| differential, I'll notice this and eventually go through
| the aggravation of cancelling to switch to a new, slightly
| higher priced service which does have click to cancel. I
| paid more for the easy cancellation promise and when it was
| revoked the service became less valuable to me. Whatever,
| it was fun while it lasted. A monthly subscription to
| Netflix is not a marriage, and it is not an investment.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > You can't find me a single example of two competing
| services, one with click to cancel and the other without,
| in the same industry.
|
| It's not click to cancel, but... airlines will charge extra
| for the right to cancel with a refund. Cheapest ticket is
| non-refundable, higher priced in refundable. But these are
| finite resources - seats, dates/times, etc. Not infinite
| capacity SaaS platforms.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| What's described here is really just legalized thievery with
| extra steps. "We make it difficult to stop paying us" versus
| "we charge extra for the privilege of not making it difficult
| to stop paying us" is just fraud versus extortion. That one
| or both may be technically legal is no excuse.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| It's not legalized thievery to make it nonfree to exit a
| contract you voluntarily signed up for in the first place.
| That's ridiculous and hyperbolic.
|
| People do it all the time, at all levels of scale and
| severity. You might as well take issue with the US
| government not having a "click to cancel" option on NATO or
| something.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| A contract requires a 'meeting of the minds'.
| Artificially inflating the practicalities of canceling
| (exiting the contract in accordance with the contract) so
| as to extract more money from one party fails that test.
|
| This isn't about cancellation fees, a fixed-term
| commitment, or anything of the sort. It's agreeing that
| "you can cancel by filling out the form" without
| mentioning that to get the form you need to climb down
| into an unlit basement, and find the form in a maze of
| unlabeled filing cabinets while evading the guard
| leopard.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Of course this is about cancellation fees. There are _so
| many_ companies which specialize in hiring leopard tamers
| to go down into those very basements, photocopy those
| very forms, and sell them at the front door for a nominal
| fee. They 're like 20% of all my YouTube ads.
|
| You're always paying a fee somewhere to hedge against
| cancellation risk somewhere in the system. There is no
| free lunch. It's either going to be in the asking price
| or at the tail end. You can force everyone to raise their
| asking price and hence price millions of people out of
| Netflix for every $1/month you go up, or you can let
| people self-select.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| If it was an actual contract that you signed, then I
| might agree, but this is just clicking a button on a
| website. That type of "contract" should be sharply
| limited in what terms it can include.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| It _is_ generally an actual contract. When you sign up
| for a service like Netflix, you are agreeing to a legally
| binding document, outlined in a document commonly known
| as "Terms of Use" or "Terms of Service." To artificially
| limit this contract would be to impede freedom of trade,
| which generally leaves everyone worse off, not better.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Freedom to trick unsophisticated consumers with giant
| stacks of legalese is not a freedom worth preserving.
| giingyui wrote:
| Courts don't only serve consumers and citizens. They also have
| to serve corporations. This is not a flippant remark;
| corporations also have rights to defend.
| sophacles wrote:
| Who the fuck cares? Seriously - a corporation is a piece of
| paper that separates ownership from responsibility. It's
| already a fucking stupid idea - You're deeply liable if you
| can't keep you trees maintained, or your car under control,
| but if you can't control you company, it's no problem?
|
| We hand out these get-out-of-trouble cards to the type of
| useless trash that destroy lives (see pollution, workplace
| safety, dangerous products knowingly misadvertised as
| healthy, etc), let those disgusting shareholders profit, and
| then use tax dollars to cover the bill (if anyone does). Now
| you wan them to have rights on top of the special treatment?
| How about instead we do something that is sane, something
| that doesn't make a handful of people extremely powerful, and
| doesn't make millions of sad, pathetic tools who just want to
| pretend they matter complicit? How about we say, "Look if you
| want special protection, you have to follow these rules that
| limit the damage you do. If you want to do those damaging
| actions, you can be responsible", and put in a bunch of rules
| that stop these specially protected investors from profiting
| off other's suffering.
|
| tl;dr - it's an incredibly stupid and ultimately harmful
| position that a paper granting special privileges has rights.
| Corporations are no more entitled to profit than anyone else,
| privileges should come with responsiblities equal to them.
| zaphar wrote:
| Then get legislation through congress to change it. The
| courts are not there to fix legislation unless it is
| superseded by other higher legal authorities. Such as the
| constitution national or state. Current legislation gives
| them corporations rights. If you think that is wrong then
| the way to change it is to get people elected who can
| change that legislation.
| sophacles wrote:
| One of the key steps to get Congress to change things is
| to first get support from voters for the change.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| In theory, courts don't "serve" anyone, but they do serve the
| rule of law. Courts _should_ remain impartial. Given this,
| it's problematic when the rule of law favors corporations
| over consumer interests, e.g. Federal Arbitration Act,
| Citizens United, thanks to corporate lobbying.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| > This is not a flippant remark; corporations also have
| rights to defend.
|
| this is Bad, Actually
| libraryatnight wrote:
| A significant portion of this community believes in "move fast
| and break things," but just for businesses, when it comes to
| helping people - slow down!
| Herring wrote:
| To be fair, helping people like them is deadly to your
| community. That's what theyre signalling, and I think they
| might have a point. You can't just give people money (power)
| because they're poor - look at Latinos voting for Trump.
| Their ethics have to also be right.
| caesil wrote:
| If you actually bother to click through and read the article,
| you'd find the court expressed sympathies with the intent of
| the rule, but the FTC "is required to conduct a preliminary
| regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual
| economic effect of $100 million or more", and they did not do
| that.
|
| The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy
| process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.
| julienchastang wrote:
| > "If you actually bother to click through and read the
| article,"
|
| HN guidelines ask that you say "The article mentions
| that".[0]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| exabrial wrote:
| ^ This.
|
| A shoddy implementation would just mean later problems.
| Hopefully the FTC gets the memo and does it "the right way"
| to make it watertight, otherwise people will just get away
| with doing whatever they want.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| This is a pretty narrow view. A lot of businesses--whose
| bread and butter (well maybe just the butter) is keeping
| people locked into subscriptions they don't want--put a large
| effort in challenging this rule. They would have fought it
| like hell during the "analysis" which would have stretched
| into the Trump presidency were it would surely would have
| been killed. Even if the analysis had been completed, it's
| likely the courts would have struck it down for overreach
| (like Dept of Education's student loan forgiveness). It died
| because a lot business interests are opposed to it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't know what you mean by "narrow" here. It sounds like
| you're saying that they did it at the last minute, and
| failed to finish. But you're saying that since the next
| administration would "surely" never do click to cancel,
| that somehow should immunize the FTC from following their
| own regulations? The next administration was elected.
|
| The reason they have to do studies is so they can't rush
| things through. We don't want them to be able to rush
| things through. They're creating law.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Depends on how accurate you think the >$100 million estimated
| impact from the lower court is. When the FTC did the analysis
| they came up with a lower impact so they didn't have to do
| it. I'd be more willing to believe they got it right than a
| single judge did.
| zaphar wrote:
| Why do you think the FTC analysis was more accurate than
| the opposing sides? The judges, of whom there were
| multiple, were going off of opposing side argumentation not
| just their own subjective opinion. That's how courts in the
| US work.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The companies suing to stop this have every reason to
| massively inflate the difficulty and cost of compliance
| to continue their long established dark patterns of
| trapping people in difficult to cancel subscriptions.
| Judges are not experts in the field and have a hard time
| evaluating the actual credibility of various presented
| estimates, you see it all the time with long debunked
| forensic evidence techniques being accepted still years
| later by judges and courts.
| skybrian wrote:
| To figure out who's right, we would need to do research,
| rather than choosing the judges versus the FTC based on
| vibes.
|
| I'm hardly going to do that research myself, so I have no
| opinion. There are legal bloggers whose opinions I'd
| respect. I assume comments on Hacker News are no more
| informed than my own, unless they show they have relevant
| expertise.
| vkou wrote:
| Why would this have any economic impact? These dark
| patterns don't generate any net value, they just move money
| from one pocket to another. The money will be spent
| somewhere else, instead.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The economic impact here is only factoring in how much it
| would cost companies to comply with the measure which is
| inherently designed to give an extra hurdle by not
| counting the money saved by consumers not trapped by dark
| cancellation patterns.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Compliance and enforcement costs
| Glyptodon wrote:
| The main reason I think the court got it right is that with
| ~33 million businesses in the US you could argue that
| sending every business an email would cost them >$100 mil
| in just labor cost if they forward it a few times and
| several employees spend a reasonable amount of time reading
| it.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing
| subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might
| be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who
| do?
|
| What's more interesting to me is the court is basically
| admitting that doing the right thing for customers will
| cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're
| currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let
| this go ahead.
| kristianbrigman wrote:
| Why does it matter? As far as I can tell ( _) the law asks
| the FTC to do an estimate, they did, and now the argument
| was 'some one else thinks it's wrong'. But does the law
| require an actual estimate?
|
| If they are worried about this... either mandate some third
| party do the estimate, or mandate the study. This is just
| confusing.
|
| (_) - of course I haven't read the actual law or ruling
| yet...
| John23832 wrote:
| I read the article. It is how I was able to reference the
| "gotcha".
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Why are you carrying water for this?
|
| The FTC didn't make that rule.
|
| Who do you think created that rule that anything that lost
| money for advertisers? I'll give you one guess
|
| The fact that you're indignant that someone doesn't agree
| with the argument is absolutely absurd.
|
| The law/rule constraint was corrupt from the outset in order
| to provide multiple avenues for capital to ensure they don't
| lose their profits.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Tidy logical explanations of rule systems that click for
| people are very powerful when they come from authority.
| There's a comfort in this sort of bureaucracy that appears
| to have taken broad considerations to protect us from
| complex dangers and second order effects.
| jakeydus wrote:
| Sure, but that's a different argument. OP wasn't carrying
| water for the companies that would be affected by this
| change, they were carrying water for the rule of law. If
| the FTC had sued saying that the $100M limit was too
| restricting and had no valid basis, then sure, this would
| be a valid argument. But the judges have to rule on the law
| as it's written, not as HN commenters would like it to be.
| Is the law wrong? Corrupt? Maybe! But that's a different
| conversation.
|
| Believe me, I'm incredibly disappointed that this didn't
| work. I paid a Planet Fitness membership for a year after I
| had moved to a place too far away from any PF location to
| reasonably use it, just because the cancellation process
| was so convoluted that it took me ages to figure out how to
| cancel. I think that companies should be held liable when
| they employ predatory business practices like this. I agree
| with your premise, that the limit is too low and there's
| nothing to stop companies from lying about the cost to
| implement the rule. But the law is the law is the law is
| the law. Courts exist to interpret the law, and in this
| case, the law they were asked to interpret was whether the
| FTC had abided by the $100M cap. They found reasonable
| justification to rule that they had not.
|
| Again, I get the desire to be up in arms over this. But
| recent events have shown just how fragile our legal system
| is when people decide that the rules can just be ignored,
| and I wish that people would be more hesitant to throw the
| baby out with the bathwater, even when doing so would mean
| I wouldn't have to pay planet fitness $20/mo for a year.
| standardUser wrote:
| > you'd find the court expressed sympathies with the intent
| of the rule
|
| And you'd find such sentiments to be completely worthless,
| except insofar as they act as cover for a ruling on a
| technicality in favor of the same corporate interests that
| fund the politicians that appointed these judges.
| epgui wrote:
| Ruling on technicalities is their job. I don't like the
| outcome either, but they did their job and they did it
| well.
| cortesoft wrote:
| If we don't want rulings based on technicalities, then
| don't put technicalities into the law.
| pavon wrote:
| In this case, I'm guessing the FTC knew it was a long shot
| and took the Hail Mary pass anyway. If they had done the
| preliminary regulatory analysis the ruling wouldn't have been
| completed during the Biden administration. So they gambled
| that it would be better to take their chances with the courts
| than with the next administration, given both Republican
| commissioners voted against the rule. Which makes this less
| of a disappointment to me that it would otherwise.
| didibus wrote:
| I don't understand, they did an estimate and found it below
| 100$ million. That seems to have followed the process. An
| estimate can always be challenged and is just a best effort
| prediction. Now it seems this create a pretty flaky ground
| for precedence that the FTC simply can never estimate less
| than 100$ million as it could always be challenged in court,
| what if it was more? And they now have to always follow the
| more effortful process of assuming it is more than 100$
| million.
|
| It really seems like a weird line in the sand that the court
| will just randomly decide on a case by case now, with the FTC
| having no way to know if the court will agree with their
| estimate or not.
| NickC25 wrote:
| This benefits the lawmaker's clients - the large corporations.
| Or maybe the lawmakers are the clients.
|
| Either way this ruling was bought and paid for.
| derektank wrote:
| People are served by knowing that, regardless of what the law
| says, it will be applied consistently. It's on the legislature
| to write new law if the old law is bad, not the judiciary.
| black6 wrote:
| In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike
| to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves
| of bread.
|
| Anatole France
| jfengel wrote:
| That would ring less hollow if there were any way for the
| legislature to actually write laws. Congress writes
| vanishingly little non-trivial legislation, because every
| proposal has to be viewed in terms of political benefit.
|
| I don't think people feel well served by knowing that bad
| laws will last forever. The civil service was supposed to be
| a non-partisan way to manage the country efficiently. It does
| not do me any good to say "No, you are stuck with the
| inefficient system, and you should feel good about that
| because at least it's written down."
| tshaddox wrote:
| I would prefer judges to settle disputes fairly, rather than
| say "I've been given the authority to settle this dispute and
| I'm going to settle it in a way that I think is unfair
| because of some alleged rules about how I'm supposed to make
| my decisions."
| barbazoo wrote:
| Companies are people too! And after all they are the biggest
| donors so this actually serves exactly who it's supposed to.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I'm not unsympathetic to those who need to cancel a gym
| membership or whatever. But Congress is too lazy or cowardly to
| do it themselves, so they delegated, and the courts have been
| reluctant to allow delegation lately... Congress knows that too.
|
| Really though, our banks should be the ones fixing this problem.
| Do they not work for us? We're more like fee cattle than we are
| customers. It should be simple to cancel through the bank itself,
| disallowing further payments. In fact though, the opposite
| happens. Once one of these vampire scams gets your card number,
| they can put through payments that you have disallowed and the
| bank will side with them rather than you. Had an incident with a
| cell phone company a few years back and the bank decided that
| they had more say over my money than I did. None of this can be
| or will be fixed, because you're all distracted by the news media
| telling you that the evil courts have cheated the heroic FTC
| bureaucracy, and that you need to vote for the other team to
| restore balance to the force.
|
| If purchasing a service requires your account/routing number, or
| the card number + cvs code, you really just need to go without.
| nashashmi wrote:
| ELI5: FTC said the rule is a cheap expense on corps. An admin
| judge says it is quite expensive. FTC is supposed to follow a
| particular procedure for expensive rules. FTC didn't follow so
| judges ruled against the regulation.
|
| FTC is better off staying away from regulations and instead
| making a vague rule prohibiting companies from complicated
| cancellation processes if they are to be charging recurring fees.
| The "complicated process" would be subjective but enough to
| encourage companies to avoid setting up a cancellation process
| (bypassing the expensive burden rule) and maybe the company then
| chooses a simpler cancellation option.
| nashashmi wrote:
| > The "complicated process" would be subjective but enough to
| encourage companies to avoid setting up a cancellation process
|
| ... avoid setting up a _complicated_ cancellation process...
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| I wonder if the decision to forgo the review process was a
| cynical gamble knowing it would be slow-walked to death or if it
| was done to score quick points with little concern given to how a
| legal challenge would play out in the future.
| doitformango wrote:
| This is an even better reason to always use Virtual Credit Cards
| or Paypal: you can cut off the source of funding with a single
| click.
|
| CapitalOne allows unlimited virtual cards and IT IS AWESOME
| because you can sidestep PayPal.
|
| Man, do Trump supporters actually get excited about awful things
| like this? I don't get it.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Another value destroying milestone of the felon seditionist's
| megagrift administration
|
| It is trivially easy to capture the intent to cancel and allow
| customers to execute in one click. Any business that does
| otherwise is actively expending energy to prey upon economic
| surplus and add to deadweight loss.
| cryptonector wrote:
| He had zero to do with this. This is on Lina Khan.
| gmd63 wrote:
| His FTC delayed the implementation of this massively popular
| rule long enough for these judges and lobbyists to find some
| rationalization that allows dark patterns to proliferate. If
| the Trump FTC reissues the rule I'll change my view.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Don't you just love getting rid of those pesky socialist
| regulations?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| #irony
|
| (unfortunately, this seems necessary here on HN)
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Slightly related: For all the crap the iOS store gets for many
| (good) reasons, this is one reason I actually LOVE to buy
| subscriptions through iOS/Apple when that option is available for
| a platform. They have the most simple cancellation process to
| manage all your subscriptions in one place. Sometimes it costs a
| $1 or more to buy through iOS but it's worth it to easily cancel
| without any hoops.
| rochak wrote:
| Absolutely! I'm at a stage where I prefer to buy a subscription
| via Apple. It's so simple to cancel. Not to mention how quick
| Apple is in general refunding any of the wrong/unsatisfactory
| purchases.
| supertrope wrote:
| My uncle got a surprise $100 credit card charge. He had clicked
| on a scam pop-up on his Apple iPhone. Somehow that led to
| installing an app and paying for an annual subscription. One
| support message to Apple got a refund.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| From the article
|
| >"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and
| deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural
| deficiencies of the Commission's rulemaking process are fatal
| here,"
|
| As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed
| to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what
| sounds good.
|
| >The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis
| when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100
| million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of Proposed
| Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a $100 million
| effect.
|
| Basically the judges, and a lower court, all agreed that there's
| no way this rule won't have at last a $100 million in impact, and
| when something has that much impact there are rules they were
| meant to follow and didn't. And they rightly commented that if
| this was allowed to stand, the FTC and every government agency
| would just always estimate low in these cases.
| marricks wrote:
| It's a pro business anti consumer supreme court which knows
| it'd be dangerous to appear that way. Government and court will
| hamstring their ability to help consumers.
|
| My favorite comment on HN was some law student saying his prof
| said "Scalia is the most complicated supreme court member whose
| views are always unpredictable" and the commenter said "he's
| just a corporate hack who always votes for corporations and
| backs it up" and sure enough he guessed every ruling correctly.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| > they rightly commented that if this was allowed to stand,
| the FTC and every government agency would just always
| estimate low in these cases.
|
| I think you missed this -- it isn't some arbitrary reason to
| rule in an anti-consumer way. There is good reason to do so.
| Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong, and this
| is one small action that does that.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong
|
| I think the tense of this sentence is not quite right.
| Something more like "Make checks and balances strong again"
| would work.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Haha, ya I agree with that too
| bagels wrote:
| There are always reasons on both sides of a case
| mring33621 wrote:
| so, small questionable wins for normal people would break
| the system while big, veeeeerrrrry questionable wins for
| some subset of the elite are OK?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> It's a pro business anti consumer supreme court
|
| Maybe? But this wasn't the supreme court: "...was vacated by
| the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit."
| Glyptodon wrote:
| $100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of
| ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the
| US.
|
| But it also seems ridiculous to skip since four people doing
| nothing but having a discussion about a new rule for 30 minutes
| across a good portion of those businesses is easily $100mil w/o
| them even having to lift a pinky besides.
| slg wrote:
| >$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost
| of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in
| the US.
|
| A minute of internet research suggests that specific $100m
| figure is from a 45-year-old law[1]. I don't know why every
| government law and regulation that references specific
| monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. That
| equivalent value today is almost $400m.
|
| EDIT: Actually the number might come from a 29-year-old
| amendment[2]. It is disappointing how hard it is to track
| these things down.
|
| [1] - https://www.nrc.gov/about-
| nrc/regulatory/rulemaking/flexibil...
|
| [2] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-
| bill/942
| ct0 wrote:
| Seems that the hard coded fixed dollar amount argument can
| apply everywhere, see small claims court maximums.
| arwhatever wrote:
| Not to mention > $10K financial transaction disclosures
| cortesoft wrote:
| Wait, a stoplight costs $10 million?
| bippihippi1 wrote:
| maybe that includes the software and hardware to run the
| stoplight, the salaries of the operators and maintenance
| etc and their admin staff, and the all the analysis to
| figure out when it should be red/green, all that stuff.
| justin66 wrote:
| No, it absolutely does not.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| No they don't. I'm not sure where they got that number
| from, but it's either wrong or being misrepresented (costs
| of entire infrastructure project confused with cost of
| lights). $10M is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude, depending
| on if you're counting installation of just one signal or a
| complete intersection.
|
| It's conceivable for the installation of traffic lights in
| a remote place to be an expensive project if there's no
| power available there, but that's a much larger project
| than just a single traffic light.
| markdown wrote:
| Depends where it is. On a military base they can be $100M.
| gmd63 wrote:
| I don't buy that argument. The issue is companies
| _deliberately_ built complexity on top of their existing
| systems to make it harder to cancel. The added complexity that
| costs a lot of money to fix is a result of their unfair and
| deceptive practices.
|
| An enormous amount of deadweight loss would be returned to the
| economy if they simply implemented a _much simpler_ design of
| click to cancel and avoided the unfair and deceptive practices
| in the first place.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Isn't the argument that making it easier to cancel
| subscriptions means that more customers will cancel and the
| cumulative effect across the industry will be much more than
| $100M?
| jakeydus wrote:
| No, I think that the $100M number comes from the cost of
| implementing the change, not the impact to the impacted
| companies' bottom line.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think the other person is right... the term is
| "economic impact" not "cost to implement"
| jakeydus wrote:
| That's what I thought too, but from the ruling in the
| article, it seemed like the justification came from
| calculating the cost to implement (emphasis on
| 'compliance costs'.
|
| > But an administrative law judge later found that the
| rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that
| compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each
| business used fewer than twenty-three hours of
| professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum
| of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| Well, the two are related. By definition, the economic
| impact must be _at least_ as much as the cost to
| implement. So estimating the cost to implement sets a
| lower bound on the total economic impact.
| gmd63 wrote:
| Why would anyone be concerned with the industry vs the
| economy? Especially when it's an industry engaged in foul
| play?
|
| Any dollar "lost" as a result of customers being able to
| cancel results in customers gaining more money to empower
| industries that are actually productive.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Obviously I agree with you morally speaking but
| apparently the law doesn't.
| tadfisher wrote:
| Sure, and I can make an argument that John's Window
| Breaking and Repair Services, LLC is performing a public
| good by stimulating economic activity.
| pavon wrote:
| That is a decent argument against the law requiring the
| analysis, but it is not a good argument that judges should
| let the FTC violate the law.
| mring33621 wrote:
| YEAH!
|
| NO PART OF THE GOVT SHOULD EVER VIOLATE THE LAW!
|
| YOU TELL 'EM, BUDDY!
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Of course anything that benefits the consumer will affect
| business revenue. That's the whole point!
| Buttons840 wrote:
| While the courts, supposedly, focus on what the law actually
| says, remember that Wickard v Filburn (1942) established that
| growing a plant on your own property for your own personal use
| is "interstate commerce".
|
| I don't know a lot about law, but I at least know that ruling
| on what the "actual law is" is selective, and usually selective
| in a way that is beneficial for the rich and powerful.
| niam wrote:
| > ruling on what the "actual law is" is selective
|
| US judges are not fact-checked and may rely on whatever
| selection of information presented in amicus briefs (as-
| filtered by 20-something year old law clerks trying their
| best) seems applicable.[1]
|
| This seems relevant here because the mentioned figure seems
| to be "compliance costs" (cost to implement), not the cost on
| the bottom line of each org. It's very possible that that
| cost still exceeds $100,000,000, but it does leave more
| discretion in the hands of the judges than the GP would seem
| to imply, and more room for judges to listen to inflated
| estimates of cost.
|
| Acknowledging that there's still something to be said about
| erring side of caution, but also that there's something to be
| said about what a ridiculous limit $100Mil is in 2025.
|
| [1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-
| are-...
| margalabargala wrote:
| So we have some cases where the courts follow the rule of
| law, and others where the stretch reality to come to insane
| but convenient conclusions, like in your example.
|
| You're right, it's absolutely applied selectively. But, while
| it would be _nice_ to have an insane, illegal, but convenient
| conclusion in our favor, that does not mean we should
| criticize the courts for following the rule of law rather
| than coming to an insane, illegal conclusion.
| lisper wrote:
| The problem is that if the courts only follow the rule of
| law some of the time then one must consider the possibility
| that these selective applications of the law are in service
| of some extra-legal agenda, in which case the fact that
| this agenda occasionally aligns with the law doesn't change
| the fact that the judges are in fact operating with compete
| disregard for the law except as it occasionally offers the
| opportunity to cover up their real motives.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Doesn't mean much when "rule of law" is just a polite way
| of stating "for my friends everything, for my enemies the
| law"
| chairmansteve wrote:
| And corporations are people...
| wizardforhire wrote:
| From wikipedia:
|
| In July 1940, pursuant to the Agricultural Adjustment Act
| (AAA) of 1938, Filburn's 1941 allotment was established at
| 11.1 acres (4.5 ha) and a normal yield of 20.1 bushels of
| wheat per acre (1.4 metric tons per hectare). Filburn was
| given notice of the allotment in July 1940, before the fall
| planting of his 1941 crop of wheat, and again in July 1941,
| before it was harvested. Despite the notices, Filburn planted
| 23 acres (9.3 ha) and harvested 239 more bushels (6,500 kg)
| than was allowed from his 11.9 acres (4.8 ha) of excess area.
|
| I don't agree with the ruling or implications of this case,
| that said it was a clear ruling of technicalities.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Good point. Also note that Interstate Commerce is a bit of a
| special case. It's sort of the exception that swallows the
| rule. The Supreme court went for decades without ruling
| against the feds on the interstate commerce issue. US v.
| Lopez (1995)(possessing a gun in a school zone) was a rare
| case where the Supremes said something was not within the
| bounds of interstate commerce.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always
| supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not
| just on what sounds good.
|
| There is reasonable room for disagreement about "what they're
| always supposed to do." Legal pragmatism is a prominent theory
| in American law.
| irrational wrote:
| From what we've seen recently, the federal government and
| federal agencies are no longer following the law, not even the
| constitution. I'm not sure what makes this case unique.
| trelane wrote:
| "No longer?!"
| eli wrote:
| > _As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they 're always
| supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not
| just on what sounds good._
|
| A "lot" of judicial rulings do indeed follow that pattern. But
| there have been mulitple high-profile & high-stakes examples
| recently of just the opposite. To the point where I thought you
| were making a joke at first.
| didibus wrote:
| What's dumb is that no one cares about the 100 million+ that
| customers lost in paying for extra months of subscriptions they
| didn't use. I feel there should be counteracting rule, like, if
| customers impact is X$$ than it doesn't matter what the
| business loss is, or maybe whichever is higher win, I don't
| know.
| grafmax wrote:
| Simply because a court followed the letter of the law doesn't
| make its decision just. Unjust societies from time immemorial
| have utilized courts to legitimize all sorts of rotten things.
|
| Claiming that the court is right to throw consumers under the
| bus based on a technicality misses the fact that the primary
| function of the legal system in our society is serving the
| capitalist class. In fact what we see here is not some
| impartial determination but the court fulfilling its structural
| purpose by betraying consumers for business profits.
| pedalpete wrote:
| If this $100 million in impact rule is the reason for the
| judgement, wouldn't that suggest that a scam that takes in more
| than $100 million would be protected?
|
| That's essentially what these businesses are doing. They're
| taking money from people who either don't want their product,
| or didn't realize that they'd be charged continuously.
|
| Just yesterday I cancelled a service, they made it very simple,
| until I read the very small print that said "this service is
| paused for 1 month". I didn't want a pause, I wanted a cancel,
| but how many people are being caught out by this.
|
| I emailed them, and the CEO replied that they are changing this
| policy. I'll try to follow up on that in a month, but I'm not
| believing this on face value.
| charles_f wrote:
| > compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each
| business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional
| services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly
| rates,"
|
| I don't get that. From what I understand the justification is
| that the economic effect is greater than the $100M bar. But what
| does the 23h of professional services has to do with anything
| there? Is the $100M impact judged only on cost of implementation?
| KittenInABox wrote:
| I don't understand why corporations can be as malicious and
| sloppy as they want but actually bringing them to justice
| requires absolute correctness on every level including bad-faith
| technicality interpretation.
| throwaway_323 wrote:
| Scammy companies like apollo.io follow dark patterns to provide
| several hoops before cancellation, refuse refunds and one click
| subscribe into an absurd annual contract.
|
| This nullification does not serve the best interest of consumers
| unfortunately.
| henearkr wrote:
| Should we understand this as an estimate that the consumers were
| tricked by difficult-to-cancel (or to opt-out) services for a
| total of $100 million of grift per year?
|
| Then why should we get all emotional about it being blocked by
| the current legislation?
|
| That's an excellent thing that this "profit" was destroyed, it is
| a net benefit for society indeed.
| Narretz wrote:
| I have a crazy suggestion ... maybe Congress should make this a
| law?! Does Congress still do this outside of insane huge budget
| bills?
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Whatever about the legal minutae, this is a bit of an own goal
| for the plantiffs. People are becoming more and more wary of
| signing up for subscriptions.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Fortunately disposable cards can still be used to unilaterally
| cancel things out when customers are trapped in a maze trying to
| escape from getting charged.
|
| At the moment this seems to be the most effective mechanism to
| stop getting robbed.
|
| Some people would argue that you might be in trouble for doing
| this, but honestly when your time and energy is consumed to the
| point where your blood starts to boil there's really no other
| alternative.
|
| I personally do not consume any online recurring subscriptions
| for this and many other reasons but is common to read nightmarish
| stories about attempting to cancel a service without any luck.
|
| Hope that things change for the better and courts stop benefiting
| corporations that do whatever nasty trick have on reach to screw
| customers.
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