Comment by skort
5 days ago
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.
The bar should be where changes happen to move in the correct direction easily, while moving in the incorrect direction harder. If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens, because the "potential gains" of doing so would be enormous.
> If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens
I can't speak to hypotheticals with certainty, but a straightforward reading of this law is that it would have exactly the same regulatory process requirements as the requirement to remove them.
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That is easy to say. However I don't think you can define "correct direction" in a useful way that also gets at what you mean. Every definition you can come up with someone will find a loop hole that fits the letter of your definition, while it is against what you mean.
By putting process in place for rules we give us time to notice bad rule proposals and give us a process to stop them.
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I think we should absolutely lower this particular bar.
When bad actors have a low bar but good actors have a high bar, the country is bound to collapse. Look at how many rules the current regime is flouting. But the other side has to dot every i for some reason.
Are we still talking about click-to-cancel here? There aren't 'other sides' in any meaningful sense on this sort of administrative decision. There is a solid consensus that people shouldn't have to pay for subscriptions they don't want and a couple of broadly inconsequential points to debate on how to implement it.
This is exactly the sort of situation where just following all the rules and procedures is fine and it doesn't, within a pretty broad range of outcomes, who gets final say.
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