Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
5 days ago
It's not legalized thievery to make it nonfree to exit a contract you voluntarily signed up for in the first place. That's ridiculous and hyperbolic.
People do it all the time, at all levels of scale and severity. You might as well take issue with the US government not having a "click to cancel" option on NATO or something.
A contract requires a 'meeting of the minds'. Artificially inflating the practicalities of canceling (exiting the contract in accordance with the contract) so as to extract more money from one party fails that test.
This isn't about cancellation fees, a fixed-term commitment, or anything of the sort. It's agreeing that "you can cancel by filling out the form" without mentioning that to get the form you need to climb down into an unlit basement, and find the form in a maze of unlabeled filing cabinets while evading the guard leopard.
Of course this is about cancellation fees. There are so many companies which specialize in hiring leopard tamers to go down into those very basements, photocopy those very forms, and sell them at the front door for a nominal fee. They're like 20% of all my YouTube ads.
You're always paying a fee somewhere to hedge against cancellation risk somewhere in the system. There is no free lunch. It's either going to be in the asking price or at the tail end. You can force everyone to raise their asking price and hence price millions of people out of Netflix for every $1/month you go up, or you can let people self-select.
If it was an actual contract that you signed, then I might agree, but this is just clicking a button on a website. That type of "contract" should be sharply limited in what terms it can include.
It is generally an actual contract. When you sign up for a service like Netflix, you are agreeing to a legally binding document, outlined in a document commonly known as "Terms of Use" or "Terms of Service." To artificially limit this contract would be to impede freedom of trade, which generally leaves everyone worse off, not better.
Freedom to trick unsophisticated consumers with giant stacks of legalese is not a freedom worth preserving.