>"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
You might be misunderstanding the purpose of the hundred million dollar rule. It is an arbitrary threshold, that’s true; any threshold would be. But what it triggers is just an extra step that the FTC must go through where they receive suggestions from the public, including the industry to be regulated, for _alternatives_ to the proposed rules. They must then go through and determine for each of the alternatives whether it would be effective at achieving the goal of the new regulation, and if so whether it would be cheaper to implement than the proposed rules. If it would be both effective and cheaper to implement, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternative rules instead.
So for example if the proposed rules said that everyone selling any kind of subscription must do X, Y, and Z, and Z was pretty expensive, then you might write in and suggest doing W instead of Z. If W would be effective and cheaper to implement than Z, then the FTC is supposed to change their proposed rules to require everyone to do X, Y, and W instead.
There's just not much reason for this step to depend on how much fraud the new rules would prevent. The public comment period and the analysis steps only take a few months, and in the grand scheme of things a few months is not much time at all.
$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.
>$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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
No.
The $100 million rule doesn't say that things with more than $100 million in impact cannot be regulated. It just says that more analysis is required when regulating such things.
This ruling regarding the FTC requirement states the court's understanding of the purpose and import. I think it's also important to acknowledge the very practical outcome of bypassing it. Future legislation will understate the impact of changes citing precedent.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I find it quite absurd to suggest that a ruling that forces corporations to simplify their business practices would cost $100 million to implement. I would be willing to bet the companies would significantly reduce their spending by following these rules, not increase them. But it's not in any way surprising that they'd find a judge who buys their massively overinflated estimates over the FTC's calculations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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."
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!
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.
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.
If there are at least 10,000 subscription services in the US and they will spend at least $10,000 to figure out if and how to comply with a click to cancel requirement (feel free to move zeros from one number to the other), the law says they must be allowed to at least have their comments heard before it's implemented. This comment opportunity was not provided.
The regulator said it didn't reach $100 million, so there was no need. The court said bs, this would cost at least that much
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.
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.
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.
That wouldn't be the standard capitalist response. After all, you still have the option to spend your money in stupid ways, the ease of cancelling is not related to that. A more standard capitalist response is that this is a market inefficiency. You're spending $20 on the gym, you're not using that service, and so presumably a humble cake maker is missing out on that $20.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> DPAs (especially the Irish one) are unfortunately known to be incredibly business friendly
Can you give me some examples of this please?
I think that the core problem for the Irish DPA is that they are woefully under-resourced, and they're up against the biggest companies in the world. Now, one could argue that this is the fault of the government/people and I'd agree with you, but that's a harder thing to change (Ireland was basically the only country that didn't throw their government out post the massive Covid/Ukraine inflation spike).
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I saw a Brilliant job posting the other day. I was thinking of applying to work there. I randomly saw this comment, and now I won’t. So thanks for the heads up.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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."
> 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.
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.
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 $$$"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. § 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 § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the definition of an ad hominem attack. If you want to prove the judges are partisan, talk about the flaws in the ruling, not who appointed them.
That's the problem that automatically arises when the justice system is made out of political appointments instead of career tracks.
There will always be the suspicion of political bias, and the haphazard way the administrations ever since Obama went in how nominations were done adds more fuel to the fire.
Yeah not a great article. "failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process" but no real details on what the procedures require that the commission did not do.
It's a pro-business decision by the most conservative court in the land, so it would have been surprising if, in all of jurisprudence, they couldn't find something to squash it with, at least temporarily.
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.
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.
> 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-...
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.
7 replies →
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.
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.
And corporations are people...
2 replies →
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.
>> 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."
2 replies →
> 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.
5 replies →
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.
You might be misunderstanding the purpose of the hundred million dollar rule. It is an arbitrary threshold, that’s true; any threshold would be. But what it triggers is just an extra step that the FTC must go through where they receive suggestions from the public, including the industry to be regulated, for _alternatives_ to the proposed rules. They must then go through and determine for each of the alternatives whether it would be effective at achieving the goal of the new regulation, and if so whether it would be cheaper to implement than the proposed rules. If it would be both effective and cheaper to implement, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternative rules instead.
So for example if the proposed rules said that everyone selling any kind of subscription must do X, Y, and Z, and Z was pretty expensive, then you might write in and suggest doing W instead of Z. If W would be effective and cheaper to implement than Z, then the FTC is supposed to change their proposed rules to require everyone to do X, Y, and W instead.
There's just not much reason for this step to depend on how much fraud the new rules would prevent. The public comment period and the analysis steps only take a few months, and in the grand scheme of things a few months is not much time at all.
1 reply →
$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.
>$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
4 replies →
Wait, a stoplight costs $10 million?
6 replies →
> 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.
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.
"No longer?!"
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.
> 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?
No.
The $100 million rule doesn't say that things with more than $100 million in impact cannot be regulated. It just says that more analysis is required when regulating such things.
1 reply →
Of course anything that benefits the consumer will affect business revenue. That's the whole point!
> 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.
This ruling regarding the FTC requirement states the court's understanding of the purpose and import. I think it's also important to acknowledge the very practical outcome of bypassing it. Future legislation will understate the impact of changes citing precedent.
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.
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?
8 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
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.
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.
24 replies →
> "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
6 replies →
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.
> 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.
3 replies →
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.
2 replies →
^ 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.
I find it quite absurd to suggest that a ruling that forces corporations to simplify their business practices would cost $100 million to implement. I would be willing to bet the companies would significantly reduce their spending by following these rules, not increase them. But it's not in any way surprising that they'd find a judge who buys their massively overinflated estimates over the FTC's calculations.
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.
1 reply →
I read the article. It is how I was able to reference the "gotcha".
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.
[flagged]
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.
Upon plain inspection, this is untrue.
1 reply →
> 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.
1 reply →
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.
2 replies →
That hasn't been true this century at the very least.
[flagged]
25 replies →
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.
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."
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."
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
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!
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.
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.
Companies are people too! And after all they are the biggest donors so this actually serves exactly who it's supposed to.
It serves the current administration's in-group: the ultra-wealthy.
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...
2 replies →
Got a surprise for you if you think any admins in group isn’t the ultra wealthy
5 replies →
If there are at least 10,000 subscription services in the US and they will spend at least $10,000 to figure out if and how to comply with a click to cancel requirement (feel free to move zeros from one number to the other), the law says they must be allowed to at least have their comments heard before it's implemented. This comment opportunity was not provided.
The regulator said it didn't reach $100 million, so there was no need. The court said bs, this would cost at least that much
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.
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.
2 replies →
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.
7 replies →
That wouldn't be the standard capitalist response. After all, you still have the option to spend your money in stupid ways, the ease of cancelling is not related to that. A more standard capitalist response is that this is a market inefficiency. You're spending $20 on the gym, you're not using that service, and so presumably a humble cake maker is missing out on that $20.
2 replies →
[dead]
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.
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.
> This is not a flippant remark; corporations also have rights to defend.
this is Bad, Actually
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.
2 replies →
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.
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.
People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they? WhatsApp spam is very pervasive, though.
4 replies →
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.)
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.
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.
At the same time European laws got whole internet littered with "Accept cookies" banners
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.
1 reply →
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.
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?
1 reply →
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.
3 replies →
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.
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.
8 replies →
It's definitely better in Europe, but certain courts and DPAs (especially the Irish one) are unfortunately known to be incredibly business friendly.
> DPAs (especially the Irish one) are unfortunately known to be incredibly business friendly
Can you give me some examples of this please?
I think that the core problem for the Irish DPA is that they are woefully under-resourced, and they're up against the biggest companies in the world. Now, one could argue that this is the fault of the government/people and I'd agree with you, but that's a harder thing to change (Ireland was basically the only country that didn't throw their government out post the massive Covid/Ukraine inflation spike).
3 replies →
neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
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.
34 replies →
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.
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.
2 replies →
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.
>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
13 replies →
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.
1 reply →
[flagged]
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.
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.
This has not been my experience cancelling eu services.
2 replies →
I am in the EU.
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.
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.
I saw a Brilliant job posting the other day. I was thinking of applying to work there. I randomly saw this comment, and now I won’t. So thanks for the heads up.
i only subscribe to services through app store on my iphone. even if costs me premium.
I use privacy dot com cards I can turn off in a single click
8 replies →
Do you mean brilliant.org ?
Yes
I call bullshit. https://help.brilliant.org/en/articles/741701-how-can-i-canc...
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.
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".
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-...
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.
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.
13 replies →
A major unwritten rule of american society is that there is no bigger crime than economic friction to the shareholder... including statute itself.
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?
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.
>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.
2 replies →
From googling apparently the "presiding officer" is appointed by the FTC chair. So it sounds like the FTC spiked its own case.
It was Lina Khan. She just felt strongly about going out the way she came in — losing every single case.
6 replies →
The U.S. Court of Appeals has therefore quantified the severity of this issue.
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.
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.
1 reply →
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
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.
2 replies →
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.
1 reply →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
2 replies →
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.
Is zombie customer an official term. And how much of their profits are from that sector? Is this like airlines over selling seats?
1 reply →
i mostly use Robinhood virtual cards for services now. if i want to cancel i just cancel the card.
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.
Please point to an example of these warnings.
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."
> 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
16 replies →
Because systematic corruption presumably?
More that they mistakenly thought that doing the right thing meant they didn't have to do the thing right.
2 replies →
>they were flouting required procedures
If you are sniffing out corruption, aren’t the ones flouting required procedures likely the corrupt ones?
4 replies →
who warned them?
A then-commissioner who is now the head of the FTC.
5 replies →
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.
> 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…
For those of you wondering what the actual decision says: <https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/25/07/243137P.pdf>
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 $$$"
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.
That is a valid paranoia,
but also, not the kind of subscription the article is about.
just mark them as spam, hurts them more and doesnt notify them of anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In a highly competitive, developed and free US market, why no bank offered this option?
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.
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.
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.
Apparently Google Play has the same cancellation mechanism.
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
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.
The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. § 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 § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
Severing contracts for me, not for thee.
[flagged]
> 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?
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.
> 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.
How could it override the decline if you cancel the card entirely in Privacy?
1 reply →
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then you risk getting sent to collections instead.
I can use fake name and address with privacy cards
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.
> Privacy.com prioritizes security through firewalls, encryption, and PCI DSS compliance.
That line of cyber security mumbo jumbo does not inspire confidence
Is there anything like this that accepts EU customers?
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.
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.
1 reply →
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.
Never heard of this; thanks for the tip!
Great, another service that collects my purchase information.
This is why I've never used these services.
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.
Spectrum (cable/telephone/internet) kept me on the phone line for 30 minutes as i tried to cancel.
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.
The need to repeat yourself over and over as you get transferred multiple times is maddening.
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.
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.
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.
I have a crazy suggestion ... maybe Congress should make this a law?! Does Congress still do this outside of insane huge budget bills?
3rd world country customer protection laws...
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.
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.
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
5 replies →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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!
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
2 replies →
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use privacy.com for this.
(Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)
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.
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.
Revolut does that, at least in France. You can see and cancel both card subscriptions and direct debits
What about subscriptions where you agreed to a long-term subscription (e.g. for a discounted rate)?
Those are usually charged once per agreed period (never seen it any other way)
4 replies →
Feels like a killer feature just waiting for someone to nail it properly
Yes there is https://www.privacy.com/ which gives you a unique virtual credit card per subscription, which you can cancel from the bank.
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.
That... doesn't necessarily work though?
If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.
3 replies →
This would be illegal in western countries.
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.
The 8th circuit court of appeals is the most conservative, with only one judge appointed by a Democratic president.
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?
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.
Weird how they only enforce the law when it serves their interests though.
6 replies →
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.)
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
[flagged]
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.
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.
He had zero to do with this. This is on Lina Khan.
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.
If we had a Congress who knew what Signal, e-mail, or credit cards were, then we may get actual legislation protecting consumer rights.
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.
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.
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).
The time to unsubscribe is now!
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.
You just offended siriusxm, every newspaper, and every gym in the country.
WaPo and NYT were both very easy to cancel.
2 replies →
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...
Office365. I only have it because it’s necessary for work not because I want to use the product.
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.
1 reply →
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.
The hard to cancel aspect should be illegal
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.
Exactly, I may love something, but have stopped getting value from it as life happens.
That is a novel idea! But ironically it is not actually the issue that was in front of the court.
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.
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.
Disputing charges through banks will become the way to cancel things.
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.
Honestly, it's wild that something as common-sense as "make canceling as easy as signing up" is this hard to implement
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.
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.
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.
While it’s true US was quite good on equality amongst this particular group. What we have now is quite different from it.
Our culture is an unfortunate nexus between strong contract enforcement and weak consumer protections.
Sure it is. Corporations are people too and laws like these take away their freedoms!
"after finding that the commission behind it failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process."
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.
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
Don't you just love getting rid of those pesky socialist regulations?
#irony
(unfortunately, this seems necessary here on HN)
Dark pattern galore
I bet Trump will surely sign an executive order putting click to cancel into place any day now.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504694
[dead]
[flagged]
This is the definition of an ad hominem attack. If you want to prove the judges are partisan, talk about the flaws in the ruling, not who appointed them.
That's the problem that automatically arises when the justice system is made out of political appointments instead of career tracks.
There will always be the suspicion of political bias, and the haphazard way the administrations ever since Obama went in how nominations were done adds more fuel to the fire.
[dead]
[flagged]
Did you read the article? "Procedures weren't followed."
Seems like an almost intentional mistake tbh
Procedures can only be ignored for the purpose of installing a police state. Not for consumer benefit.
Yeah not a great article. "failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process" but no real details on what the procedures require that the commission did not do.
18 replies →
It's a pro-business decision by the most conservative court in the land, so it would have been surprising if, in all of jurisprudence, they couldn't find something to squash it with, at least temporarily.
Or motivated reasoning for the court to reach the outcome it wanted.
"Calvinball"
If someone needs a new boat and the ruling prevents that then it must be stricken.
They just follow the party line, so look further at the party for the explanation