[HN Gopher] Netflix must refund customers for years of price hik...
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       Netflix must refund customers for years of price hikes, Italian
       court rules
        
       Author : xbmcuser
       Score  : 23 points
       Date   : 2026-04-04 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
        
       | lashull wrote:
       | Can you already describe this as a current trend, court rulings
       | against big tech? Like the jury decisions against instagram /
       | meta last week and so on.
        
         | amarcheschi wrote:
         | No, I read part of the full sentence in italian and as far as I
         | can understand, the tribunal contests not the fact (increasing
         | prices), but the way that it was done which is unlawful. They
         | also contest other things, for example, you have to say the
         | legal words "modifica unilaterale del contratto" when changing
         | the contract, which makes it clear you're getting screwed one
         | way or another by the way. In this case Netflix wrote to the
         | users "updating plan price" which is much more ambiguous and
         | not as clear as the above saying. It is ridiculous to not know
         | about this, because everybody here knows they're the keywords
         | you read when somebody is raising the price of some service.
         | Let alone a poor big tech that couldn't know they had to
         | specify the legal phrasing.
         | 
         | For similar reasons, many more points of the consumer
         | association were rejected, because Netflix in those cases
         | fulfilled the requirements of the consumer protection code in
         | its tos
        
           | lschueller wrote:
           | Learned something new. Thank you! This phrasing indeed sounds
           | like profound legal knowledge in this particular country.
           | Quite surprising to miss on that as such a big company. Looks
           | a bit like US legals were overconfident, or they did not have
           | legal reps in Italy.
        
             | heavenlyblue wrote:
             | Wouldn't that be the case for some US states?
        
       | conartist6 wrote:
       | > Per Italian law, price increases that Netflix has issued or
       | will issue beyond April 2025 are legal. At that time, Netflix
       | adjusted its terms to state that contract terms could one day
       | change due to technological, security, or regulatory needs, to
       | clarify clauses, or to provide changes to the service, Il Sole 24
       | Ore reported.
       | 
       | That's a pretty surprising and weird set of magic words you have
       | to say to be legal in Italy, yo
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-04 23:01 UTC)