>"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.
The problem is that if the courts only follow the rule of law some of the time then one must consider the possibility that these selective applications of the law are in service of some extra-legal agenda, in which case the fact that this agenda occasionally aligns with the law doesn't change the fact that the judges are in fact operating with compete disregard for the law except as it occasionally offers the opportunity to cover up their real motives.
Sure, I don't disagree, my point is just that the solution is not to transition from "ignore the law most of the time" to "ignore the law all of the time".
I've seen this attitude an increasing amount over the past few years. I think it's the same thing that's responsible for the current US presidential administration.
There's this attitude of, "this thing is partly broken sometimes. We should make it all broken, all the time, and that will be better".
Is there this faith that some higher power will swoop in afterwards and replace the now completely broken system with something that's good?
I think the result will be, things will simply be much worse than they were before.
I don't want to make it all broken. I would much prefer it not to be broken at all. I would much prefer if the courts just followed the law all the time. But if it's going to be broke, if the courts are not going to follow the law, I'd much prefer they do it all the time so that it is obvious that they are not following the law, and then maybe people will notice and do something about it.
The real problem I think is that no one seems to actually want the courts to follow the law. Everyone wants the courts to bend the law to their own desires, and so everyone gives them a pass when they do this. And that's how we end up in situations like we are in now.
It sort of does mean that. If the courts selectively rule in favor of one class, and we can’t do anything about it, then the best thing to do may absolutely be to encourage selective rulings against them.
I see why you say that, but I prefer the long term results of fighting against insane rulings when they're bad, rather than the long term effects of fighting for insane rulings on the occasions that I find them convenient.
I don’t think we can successfully fight insane rulings in the near future. It’s on the same order as getting money out of politics; disagrees completely with the current incentives of the system and would require a massive political push. It seems to me that the system is working as intended in allowing insane rulings, and that we should attempt to use that to our advantage, since the powerful absolutely will continue to do so and there’s basically jack shit we can do about it right now.
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.
The decision is not about whether Filburn violated the AAA, it's about if production quotas under the AAA are even constitutional.
Congress has limited powers, and one of those is to regular interstate commerce (The "Commerce Clause"). SCOTUS decided that production quotas counted as regulating interstate commerce, and was therefore constitutional.
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.
A few months added to all the subscriptions people are paying for and not using could easily surpass 100+ million in lost customer money. I'd still venture it makes sense to have a counter party looking at the financial harm to the public, and not just the companies.
$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.
> I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation.
It's an utter mess. This job falls primarily to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who compiles the basket of goods that make up the Consumer Price Index - but this doesn't include food or fuel, for example.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis also maintains several indices which are used as inflation proxies when it's convenient (and which are most often used by the various working groups within the federal reserve system to, eg, determine interest rates). But these are somewhat more volatile and more subject to fluctuations due to international political affairs, etc.
The most obvious metric - the literal inflation in the money supply - is also tricky because the process by which money is created is so baroque.
The ability to have more coherent laws which reference amounts of money is a good reason to adopt sounder and more transparent practices in monetary policy.
I don't understand the point in raising these specific practical objections like my simple comment was intended to be the text of the legislation. There are all sorts of ways these issues can be addressed like pegging it to a specific index of inflation and have it run on a long delay to allow full transparency and predictability.
No they don't. I'm not sure where they got that number from, but it's either wrong or being misrepresented (costs of entire infrastructure project confused with cost of lights). $10M is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude, depending on if you're counting installation of just one signal or a complete intersection.
It's conceivable for the installation of traffic lights in a remote place to be an expensive project if there's no power available there, but that's a much larger project than just a single traffic light.
maybe that includes the software and hardware to run the stoplight, the salaries of the operators and maintenance etc and their admin staff, and the all the analysis to figure out when it should be red/green, all that stuff.
I had in mind a project in my area a few years back where redoing a four way major intersection was quoted like that, not actually one literal stoplight just purchased and delivered.
> 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.
Note especially that the hundred million dollar rule is about the amount of impact _of the new rules_, not the impact of the fraud that they’re trying to deter. The extra steps that they must go through are all about finding alternative rules that would be cheaper to implement, using suggestions from the public and the regulated industry.
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?
Why would anyone be concerned with the industry vs the economy? Especially when it’s an industry engaged in foul play?
Any dollar “lost” as a result of customers being able to cancel results in customers gaining more money to empower industries that are actually productive.
That's what I thought too, but from the ruling in the article, it seemed like the justification came from calculating the cost to implement (emphasis on 'compliance costs'.
> But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said.
Well, the two are related. By definition, the economic impact must be at least as much as the cost to implement. So estimating the cost to implement sets a lower bound on the total economic impact.
No, it is only cost to implement the new rules. If this cost is estimated to be above one hundred million dollars, then extra review steps are required. These steps allow the public, and the regulated industry, to suggest alternatives. These alternatives must be evaluated to see if they would be both effective and cheaper for legitimate businesses to implement. If they are, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternative rules instead. This keeps the rules themselves from hurting legitimate businesses; the illegitimate businesses aren’t going to follow the rules anyway.
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.
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.
Not even that. There's no rule in the GDPR to disclose the use of cookies. The regulation doesn't actually mention cookies at all, except maybe in an example. Instead, any data collection that's obviously required to do what the user requests (including session and shopping cart cookies) doesn't require any explicit consent. Only additional data collection, whether performed by cookies or any other means, requires consent.
That's why there are websites without cookie banners, like GitHub. It's not even hard to do that; it's just that most companies don't bother, because they know the EU will be blamed anyway.
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.
The FTC have no say in choosing to exist or not exist, or what laws are passed that they are supposed to enforce. In some cases, an agency intentionally choosing to not carry out their duties would even be breaking the law and subject to penalty or punishment. How the FTC goes about interpreting their duties and then the court system correcting their behavior when they disagree or misbehave is the system working as intended. If they don't have laws to interpret for an issue though, that's a legislative problem.
The real question is why isn't congress doing their job? They control both the existence and funding of the FTC and additionally the laws the FTC are tasked with interpreting and enforcing. If congress is unfit for purpose they should be replaced.
While it’s correct to assert the FTC can’t choose to ignore its enabling act, it’s false to say: 1) the FTC has no say in the laws they are supposed to enforce 2) Congress controls the laws the FTC is tasked with enforcing.
As to 1, the FTC writes the laws it enforces. These laws are called regulations. As to 2, of course Congress could write laws that have to be enforced, but when it comes to regulatory agencies, Congress does quite the opposite. Instead of writing the laws concerning trade, Congress wrote an enabling act delegating this authority to the agency.
Calling for the replacement of a branch of government without understanding any of this would be avoidable with a better educational system.
The ftc isn’t supposed to create laws though. I tend to overshoot on the consumer’s side, but the ftc is overstepping with actions like this. There should be a law passed on this point and then ftc can enforce. Or ftc can sue based on existing law and let courts buy their interpretation.
> 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).
OK, from 2018 so they were even more under-resourced (if that's possible).
Additionally, the Irish DPC got involved from other data authorities, which may have caused delays.
That being said, they were dead wrong not to take on that case, as it was clear violation of GDPR. I actually worked for Meta/Facebook at this point and got drunk and bitched about this exact screen with one of their privacy lawyers. It was total non-compliance and should have been punished much harder.
Note also that the Hamburg DPA is crazy, they kept pushing compliants that were never supported by anyone else. I'm a little annoyed at noyb for not putting their complaints to the appropriate authority, but they appear to have learned better in the intervening years.
This on the other hand, is a work of opinion by a Berlin correspondent for a pretty poor newspaper. There probably is a bunch of pressure/lobbying on the DPC to avoid massive, massive fines which shouldn't happen but does everywhere.
The conceptual difference here is important. The goal should be to preserve privacy, not fine arbitrary large amounts of money. Like, sometimes you do need to fine people but personally I'd prefer auditing requirements for Meta/Google et al rather than fines.
I'm gonna need to think about this, tbh. I do have a certain amount of sympathy for the Irish DPC given the resourcing constraints and the size of their opponents. I'm not sure where the right balance is, tbh.
> The conceptual difference here is important. The goal should be to preserve privacy, not fine arbitrary large amounts of money. Like, sometimes you do need to fine people but personally I'd prefer auditing requirements for Meta/Google et al rather than fines.
I'm operating under the assumption that most tech giants (and in particular Meta) are doing everything in their power to keep violating people's privacy as long as they can get away with it.
Since it's impossible to audit everything such a huge corporation is doing and since cases can take a very long time to resolve (after which the damage is often already done), the huge fines are for scaring companies into submission. I am perfectly fine with that, no actually: I wish the fines were so big that they were actually threatening the business's survival.
> I'm not sure where the right balance is, tbh.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I think that Facebook simply shouldn't exist.
> I'm operating under the assumption that most tech giants (and in particular Meta) are doing everything in their power to keep violating people's privacy as long as they can get away with it.
This is a bad take. They want to make money and make the stock price go up (at the exec level) but lots of people there want to make good products (even in ads). Encouraging them to find less privacy invasive ways of doing this is probably a better approach.
> Since it's impossible to audit everything such a huge corporation is doing and since cases can take a very long time to resolve (after which the damage is often already done), the huge fines are for scaring companies into submission. I am perfectly fine with that, no actually: I wish the fines were so big that they were actually threatening the business's survival.
But it doesn't work. We've had GDPR for 7 years now, and while it's definitely made some things a lot better, I don't see much decrease in privacy invasion from the Big 2 (Google and Facebook). Depressingly, the biggest impact on privacy has been from Apple's anti-competitive ATT moves.
> I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I think that Facebook simply shouldn't exist.
Yeah, this is a wild take. Do you feel the same about Google who do basically all of the same stuff?
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.
We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
The dyad left-v-right is just stupid. The issues are complex. We must move under and out of the political bs of conservative v. liberal if we're gonna get anywhere.
While I generally agree with this framing, “whatever you call what’s currently holding the reins of power” vs. “not that” still feels useful currently; the empowered party and its ideology are pretty extreme.
Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
Take the stupid of the far right and idiots like Trump, then multiply through by -1. It presents differently but it'll still screw stuff up keeping the idiocy in cycle. There's morons on left too!
The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred.
But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences?
Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled.
I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
It doesn't have to be China or any other country. It can be corporations who move to capture the governments in other countries the way they've done in the US.
Why does it have to be China and why does it have to be any one country? Why can’t it be China, EU, and the US all having about the same influence?
But besides, with the rightward, populist/religious nut tilt of the US and corporations being able to bribe the President to get what they want without repercussions (Disney, Paramount, Meta, X, etc), I don’t see how the US is much better. All of the branches of government are giving power to the President that should be theirs.
Because there will always be someone with an advantage over the others.
Equilibriums in geopolitics are inherently unstable, states naturally compete for their own self-interest. No state will be willingly co-equal with another unless some actor with greater power forces it into that position.
To your last point, given the state of the US, it would probably be better for the world if the EU were on top at the moment. But they will not be.
While I’ve only personally spent a day in an EU country so far - a day trip from London to Paris last month (more coming over the years) - I would much rather see European values exported to the world than US values - lack of universal healthcare, gun violence, corporate takeover of government, anti-vax, anti-science nut cases, etc.
It's not clear to me that China is batting that well. I do not wish bad upon the Chinese citizenry, and China has done well in its own day since the 1960s.
But don't forget at the same time where China was during the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions, nor the state control over the Chinese populace.
Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK, for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one country" rule the CPP landed on.
Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit different. It's got internal issues of employment, real estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full.
My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter to keep in mind.
China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense, but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
I would too. If we agree that monopolies are bad for private industry, why isn’t it just as bad as having one world power. I think Trump and MAGA are uninformed idiots. But they have caused the EU to start building up their own military industry, countries to focus more on their own research and decouple themselves from the US. I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.
The US has given me all sorts of opportunities I wouldn’t have anywhere else in the world as a native born citizens. I plan to extract as much as I can from it and keep my eyes open to retiring somewhere else.
I continuously vote and advocate for policies like universal healthcare, pre-K education, etc. But what are you going to do when voters vote for politicians thst ars against their own interests - getting rid of FEMA when the states that need it the most are Republican, Medicaid, etc.
This isn’t a pie in the sky shrill “I’m leaving the US tomorrow”. But my wife and I already did the digital nomad thing domestically for a year starting in late 2022 and going forward starting next year, we are going to be spending more time out of the country in US time zones while I work remotely starting with Costa Rica.
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US. However they have never seen any point - they mostly (not entirely) agree with the US and so it would be a waste of their limited time to do that instead of what they were doing instead.
> It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US.
Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped their independence. The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
> The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-European military alliance, they could have done so but instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.
Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European countries decided to basically gut their military budgets and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the fact that until very recently only a small fraction of the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget targets.
De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be gave up on the concept of military independence.
In the 1950s that was true. By 1960 it was already changing. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s Europe was plenty rebuilt enough that they could have redirected their efforts to opposing the US, but they mostly choose not to. Sure the US had a head start, but they have plenty of power. China is moving in the direction of opposing the US in the world, and seeing results.
> It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
well in the past year, we have stopped funding science in the US, arrested and deported thousands of foreign students here legally, removing the pipeline for the smartest people in the world to move to the US and start world changing companies, and started a trade war with the entire world, making American businesses much less competitive at buying/selling goods internationally.
to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing people in El Salvador
The US used to be run by people with the ability to think strategically, or by people who listened to educated people who could think strategically. The current US leadership either allows or endorses the capricious whims of an TV-educated idiot to consistently undermine national security and the most fundamental national interests. The complete and total mismanagement of the covid pandemic stands as a perfect example of the scale of the positively massive amount of preventable destruction being wrought presently. That’s just one out of many.
Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of control rogue agencies are kidnapping people indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are falling precipitously, and a greater and greater percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful primary education). You simply won’t have the talent pools required to do hard things at scale after a while. This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability of the economics of
supply chains, as incoherent economic policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in advance.
You need some basic levels of functioning society and infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions and structures and companies and technology. The US has been attacking its own society’s foundations for decades, and has recently accelerated the pace substantially.
I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a generation, certainly not continued technological innovation.
Corporations. European politics can be captured by large corporations the same way the US has been. It was unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere as well.
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.
The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy.
Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.
"Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now).
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.
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?
I would say things like cable and internet companies, as well as airlines. They are similarly frustrating in Europe but not to the extent that they are in the US and the difference comes down to better regulation.
For that matter I would say the tech regulation environment probably benefits European consumers with stronger data privacy rights, and a 14-day right to withdraw from digital contracts.
To be honest I don't think they do "no question asked refunds" for the consumer's benefit -- probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return requests they get.
I'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large expensive items.
Sure, but just because it's also pleasant for the consumer as a byproduct doesn't mean you can attribute their actions to that cause, e.g. this doesn't make them altruistic.
I think it's more about the type of store. I was with acquaintances returning clothes at high end stores (meaning: expensive) and service was great. I would not try that at a low end store (meaning: cheap).
From my point of view processing a return costs the store money. If they don't make a high margin they will (try to) discourage it. If in US everywhere they are fine with it for me it means they make higher margins everywhere.
Exactly. Europe’s regulations are about the absolute bottom, not intended to be taken as the average experience.
On average US companies are much better with customer experience. Of course until they corner you, then they may choose not to and then you have it worse than Europeans.
In the Netherlands literally every single store has no questions asked refunds for up to a month. Not that I have to do it often, but for example Coolblue and Bol both offer free returns within a month. Pretty much any webstore I have literally ever used has the same refund policies. Not to mention that the topic of this thread is already in-place EU wide, so there's an obvious win there too.
The same is true for Europe. I've never had an issue returning items on Amazon, whether they're for personal or business use (where you don't have the right to return items). The same goes for local and European chains.
> Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the time
I'm not sure where you're getting your information about the EU from, but I can return any item I order online within 14 days, and then I have another 14 days to send it back, no questions asked, no need to give any reason. Some companies even offer 30 to 90 days, but the 14 + 14 days is the legal minimum.
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?
Xfinity comes to mind. The last time I bought a new modem, I had to basically yell 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally got to speak to a living, breathing human, who could provision the modem for me.
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.
So it is sometimes better to buy stuff online, because the reasoning is that you haven't seen or tried them, but when you buy it in a physical shop, then you were aware what you bough and can't claim that you couldn't check the colour of a thing or how it fit you or whatever else reason you can think of.
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.
Why does it matter? As far as I can tell () the law asks the FTC to do an estimate, they did, and now the argument was ‘some one else thinks it’s wrong’. But does the law require an actual estimate?
If they are worried about this… either mandate some third party do the estimate, or mandate the study. This is just confusing.
() - of course I haven’t read the actual law or ruling yet…
The FTC did their estimate, it came out to less than $100 million so they, to their estimation were not required to take the additional steps of some types of impact analysis and the required comment period etc about it, the courts are disagreeing with the FTC and kicking the rule out. They only have to do that extra step when the economic impact would exceed $100m USD.
The main reason I think the court got it right is that with ~33 million businesses in the US you could argue that sending every business an email would cost them >$100 mil in just labor cost if they forward it a few times and several employees spend a reasonable amount of time reading it.
Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who do?
What's more interesting to me is the court is basically admitting that doing the right thing for customers will cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let this go ahead.
> Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who do?
This is quite correct. The FTC estimated that there are 106,000 businesses offering subscriptions to Americans. Those are the ones that would have to comply with the new rules.
A hundred million dollars is a lot of money, but divided by a hundred thousand businesses it suddenly is only $1000 each. Not actually that much! Since the new rules proposed by the FTC include a lot more than just a button on a website, complying with the rules would in fact require every one of these companies to do a fair amount of work. They’ll have to review all of their existing marketing material, and all of the forms that they use to sign up customers. They must ensure that all material facts are disclosed to every prospective customer, and that consent is obtained from the customer correctly.
Certainly these are good rules for businesses to follow, but the question now is the cost. Can your business review all of its marketing material for less than $1000? I doubt it. So the judge rightfully noted that the FTC’s estimate of the impact was insufficient.
And all they have to do as a result is to allow additional public comment on the proposed rules, with the specific intent to find alternatives. If these alternative rules would be just as effective but cheaper to comply with then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternatives. They had already done some of this in the earlier phases of the process, and the result was that several unworkable rules were indeed dropped. They could have spent a few more months doing the final review and analysis, but they decided to rush it through instead.
> What's more interesting to me is the court is basically admitting that doing the right thing for customers will cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let this go ahead.
I’ll say it again that this has nothing to do with how much the unscrupulous are getting away with, or whether it would cost the unscrupulous businesses anything at all. This is entirely about the cost to the legitimate businesses.
Why do you think the FTC analysis was more accurate than the opposing sides? The judges, of whom there were multiple, were going off of opposing side argumentation not just their own subjective opinion. That's how courts in the US work.
The companies suing to stop this have every reason to massively inflate the difficulty and cost of compliance to continue their long established dark patterns of trapping people in difficult to cancel subscriptions. Judges are not experts in the field and have a hard time evaluating the actual credibility of various presented estimates, you see it all the time with long debunked forensic evidence techniques being accepted still years later by judges and courts.
To figure out who's right, we would need to do research, rather than choosing the judges versus the FTC based on vibes.
I'm hardly going to do that research myself, so I have no opinion. There are legal bloggers whose opinions I'd respect. I assume comments on Hacker News are no more informed than my own, unless they show they have relevant expertise.
Why would this have any economic impact? These dark patterns don't generate any net value, they just move money from one pocket to another. The money will be spent somewhere else, instead.
The economic impact here is only factoring in how much it would cost companies to comply with the measure which is inherently designed to give an extra hurdle by not counting the money saved by consumers not trapped by dark cancellation patterns.
Right. It doesn’t count the money consumers save by not being trapped primarily because most businesses are legitimate. This threshold is all about identifying rules that are costly for legitimate businesses to implement and allowing them time to suggest alternative rules. If the alternative rules would be just as effective while being cheaper to implement, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules in favor of the cheaper alternatives.
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.
Sure, but that's a different argument. OP wasn't carrying water for the companies that would be affected by this change, they were carrying water for the rule of law. If the FTC had sued saying that the $100M limit was too restricting and had no valid basis, then sure, this would be a valid argument. But the judges have to rule on the law as it's written, not as HN commenters would like it to be. Is the law wrong? Corrupt? Maybe! But that's a different conversation.
Believe me, I'm incredibly disappointed that this didn't work. I paid a Planet Fitness membership for a year after I had moved to a place too far away from any PF location to reasonably use it, just because the cancellation process was so convoluted that it took me ages to figure out how to cancel. I think that companies should be held liable when they employ predatory business practices like this. I agree with your premise, that the limit is too low and there's nothing to stop companies from lying about the cost to implement the rule. But the law is the law is the law is the law. Courts exist to interpret the law, and in this case, the law they were asked to interpret was whether the FTC had abided by the $100M cap. They found reasonable justification to rule that they had not.
Again, I get the desire to be up in arms over this. But recent events have shown just how fragile our legal system is when people decide that the rules can just be ignored, and I wish that people would be more hesitant to throw the baby out with the bathwater, even when doing so would mean I wouldn't have to pay planet fitness $20/mo for a year.
Tidy logical explanations of rule systems that click for people are very powerful when they come from authority. There’s a comfort in this sort of bureaucracy that appears to have taken broad considerations to protect us from complex dangers and second order effects.
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.
I don't know what you mean by "narrow" here. It sounds like you're saying that they did it at the last minute, and failed to finish. But you're saying that since the next administration would "surely" never do click to cancel, that somehow should immunize the FTC from following their own regulations? The next administration was elected.
The reason they have to do studies is so they can't rush things through. We don't want them to be able to rush things through. They're creating law.
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.
> There is no reason why the current FTC shouldn't implement it. It literally harms nobody except for businesses addicted to dark patterns.
Well:
> The FTC issued the proposal in March 2023 and voted 3-2 to approve the rule in October 2024, with Republican Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson voting against it. Ferguson is now chairman of the FTC, which has consisted only of Republicans since Trump fired the two Democrats who remained after Khan's departure.
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.
Trying to extrapolate the behavior of people with $100 billion from the behavior of people with $5 million is clearly nonsense. That's as big of a difference as between someone who makes $20 million per year and someone at the global extreme poverty line of $2.66 per day.
Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.
More like “five richest people in the US according to their tax returns”. Nobody has counted the money of the Saudi Prince, the president of Russia, and a few dozen other characters like these.
Intuitively it feels like their wealth would eclipse Elon Musk.
Can you seriously compare the administration building concentration camps, cutting medicare for 12 millions people (effectively killing a lot of them) and dooming America's future through insane spending to the previous administration?
I do not hold the democrats in my heart but claiming they're "both equally bad" is absolutely ludicrous.
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.
> You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.
We can get pretty close. Take Adobe versus Affinity. Same industry, very similar product suites, but totally different pricing strategies, and Adobe makes cancellation much more annoying.
There are plenty of examples of this if you keep your eyes open. I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't have an exact example to give you is because I'm under NDA and I don't watch most consumer retail enough to know.
>Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.
Tacit collusion becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain in any market with more than a handful of players. A different pricing strategy is one of the easiest ways to counterposition against an incumbent there is. It's part of how SaaS toppled bubble wrap CDs in the first place.
That can be lower pricing with the same model, or it can be a one time purchase versus a subscription, or it can be a hard to cancel but very cheap subscription over a very expensive one time purchase.
> In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content.
People are more willing to pay $10 per month with ads than $12 per month without ads. I don't find that especially shocking. The market figures out what people actually want, not what people say they want.
Say it were not so. Then we would see some Netflix renegades start a new streaming platform that is Ad Free Again™ and only a tiny bit more expensive than the competitors, and most consumers would switch. It's not impossible, but I haven't seen that happen yet.
>You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option.
If I care enough about the feature and this price differential, I'll notice this and eventually go through the aggravation of cancelling to switch to a new, slightly higher priced service which does have click to cancel. I paid more for the easy cancellation promise and when it was revoked the service became less valuable to me. Whatever, it was fun while it lasted. A monthly subscription to Netflix is not a marriage, and it is not an investment.
> You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.
It's not click to cancel, but... airlines will charge extra for the right to cancel with a refund. Cheapest ticket is non-refundable, higher priced in refundable. But these are finite resources - seats, dates/times, etc. Not infinite capacity SaaS platforms.
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.
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.
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.
Incorrect, strictly speaking I'm spending $20 on the option to visit the gym for a month, just like how you might sound $20 for the option of using Netflix for a month.
Options provide value to the purchaser even when they are not exercised. It is a common but grave error to model options the same way one would model a simpler pay-per-usage style service for that reason. We might as well start telling people they can't buy monthly bus passes if they don't use them every day.
But as I noted, there is nothing stopping you keeping that option. It is perfectly fine for you to pay for the option if you want to keep paying for it, even without using it. That is perfectly efficient. The inefficiency is when you want to cancel in order to spend the money elsewhere and you're unable to do so because the subscription is hard to cancel. At that point you no longer want the service, you want to spend your money on cakes, but you cannot.
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.
Then get legislation through congress to change it. The courts are not there to fix legislation unless it is superseded by other higher legal authorities. Such as the constitution national or state. Current legislation gives them corporations rights. If you think that is wrong then the way to change it is to get people elected who can change that legislation.
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.
For example, in Switzerland you cannot cancel your landline or mobile phone subscription (at the two largest providers) without calling or chatting to customer support. They excluded "cancellation by mail/e-mail" explicitly in their terms of use.
I recently tried to cancel my landline and first they told me I could only cancel within 1 to 3 months up to the expiration, not earlier (which is clearly against any existing law).
Just that: my experience has been roughly the same in an EU country and the US: there was not some magical interface or customer-centric viewpoint the imbued everything by virtue of 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.
once something is in collections, you can negotiate to pay a fraction of the original price. it's actually harder to do so before then.
or, you can just not pay even through collections. rarely does it impact credit score (much). lots of kinds of debt even legally can't (eg <$500 medical debt)
> you can negotiate to pay a fraction of the original price.
what gives you the negotiating power ? they can simply dock you on your credit report. thats what comcast did to me. they didn't care about negotiating
I think that is how collections work. When a business can't get you to pay they sell the right to collect it to another "collections" business (let's call it Y). Y pays a fraction of the amount owed for the right so even if they can get you to pay like 25%, they are still making a profit.
this assumes you're using it for a service that has your name/address/birthdate/social.
i use it for stuff like scammy dark pattern photoshop trials, and i can use a fake name and address.
i wouldn't use it for stuff like utilities or gym memberships that absolutely send stuff to collections and they deliberately collect your information to be able to do so
> 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.
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.
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.
Rules that give leeway to act when consumer costs are estimated to be above a certain threshold, instead of when company costs are below a certain threshold would be a much better, if still imperfect, rule that would satisfy the “correct direction in a useful way”.
Just off the top of my head, you could have a rule that if some business activity is estimated to cost consumers $100 million or more, then FTC can implement it instead of looking at the cost to companies. The “average US household” spends $200 a year on forgotten or unused subscriptions [1], if even 10% of those are due to a lack of click to cancel, that is $2.6 billion per year.
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.
The "other side" does not consider themselves anti-consumer. You disagree with them on what anti-consumer means, but they have their own reasons to consider their position pro-consumer and you are doing debate a disservice by ignoring that.
They do consider themselves anti-regulation and anti-government in general, but they are not (mostly) anarchists, they do agree with some regulation and government, they just want the minimum possible and thus place a high bar on how bad the alternatives must be before they will agree to regulation/government.
I for one was definitely speaking about the general case, not this particular case. My point was that due process is not, generally speaking, a bad thing - even if it means that "progress" is sometimes a little slow to come by.
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.
In general the better experience will command higher price, right. That is true, and by forcing same lowest level on everyone we are constructing artificial floor on how bad an experience can be.
Or at least ensuring that bad experience is so profitable that the competitor is ready to even pay the fee for violations.
Illegal markets operate in this territory. No consumer protection there, sorry.
I started to understand the question more, thank you for your comment
It better fits the facts that the incoming FTC wants this, but they want to do the job right. At least some of the incoming FTC was in place when they rule was passed in the first place and their statements then say they wanted the rule but they wanted the correct procedures done so that it would stand up in court.
If they wanted to change how they implement the rule they could have withdrawn it rather than continue to an adverse judgement in court.
Basically the FTC is required to go through a lengthy (probably multi-year) impact analysis if they determine that the rule will cause more than $100 million in impact to the US economy.
The previous administration determined that this rule would not meet the threshold, allowing quick implementation. The current administration then said "actually we think this would meet the threshold" giving the court an excuse to strike the rule down.
If the trump administration is correct that trapping people in gotya-contracts by making it difficult to cancel really constitutes $100 million of economic activity in the US, I think that says that there's something truly rotten about the basis of our economy.
You would have attacked them for withdrawing the rule as well. You have setup a can't win situation and then are attacking someone for losing.
If Liberals really wanted this rule they would have followed the law. Evidence is the conservatives when this was passed objected because the law was not being followed. They were then left in this can't win situation.
I would have criticized them for getting rid of a rule that protects consumers, yes.
But it would have been far more honest than what they've done here, where they set up a kabuki theater legal defense so that they can avoid the bad politics of killing a very good rule to protect monied special interests.
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.
Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.
Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.
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.
It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.
Sure, 23 hours on average is generous if the goal is honest implementation. But the issue isn’t the time. It is that companies don’t want this button to exist at all. They are not stalling because it's hard; they’re stalling because friction equals profit. That’s why you get weaponized complexity, endless “design reviews” and inflated estimates. The FTC did their job, sort of. They got “cancelled” (hehe) because of a bureaucratic hurdle.
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.
This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.
The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.
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.
zombie purchasers is the business model of basically every gym. they lose money on the people that actually show up. the money makers are the people who sign up for a membership, go once or twice and then forget to cancel (or purchased a full year at once)
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.
It literally says they were warned by the administrative judge that a preliminary regulatory analysis was required to make such a rule.
> Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule,"
You must not work on these sorts of systems. It can easily take more than 24 hours. In case you’re genuinely interested in learning more, here’s how it works.
There are good reasons for it working this way, BTW. The needs of a company with hundreds or thousands of people are different than the needs of hobbyists and early-stage startups.
1. A user experience designer analyzes the user flow and decides where to put the cancellation button. They make decision about style, layout, and wording. This isn’t a ton of work, but something so critical to the company’s business and retention numbers will probably involve a lot of review, discussion, and bike shedding. This could easily take 24 people-hours of work on its own.
2. Somebody programs the front-end change. They probably have to put it behind a feature flag so it’s not visible until the back end is ready.
3. Somebody programs the back-end. They think about security, authentication, authorization, CSRF. That’s probably handled, but again, this is a critical feature and deserves extra care.
4. Somebody programs the interface to the company’s internal systems. They’re usually kind of a pain to work with. Billing, marketing, support, customer success. Something probably sends an email to the user. Maybe there’s a follow up flow to try to get them back with a special offer a month later. Etc.
5. The change is tested. Preferably with automated tests, but a feature like this has tendrils into systems throughout the company, and a lot of moving parts, so manual testing is also important. If it goes wrong, it’s a big deal, involving the potential for chargebacks and lawsuits, both of which are expensive at scale.
Throughout all this, you’re dealing with legacy code, because billing is one of the oldest systems the company has, and the one with the most risk of change, so the code is nasty and doesn’t follow current conventions. Every change is painful and tedious.
It’s alien to you that this could take more than 24 hours? At any company of size, I have trouble imagining it taking less.
Of course now that the FTC rule is well known, anyone designing a new system would require click-to-cancel. The new burden is low, but at the time the big companies probably spent millions to fix it.
A more extreme example would be the US Clean Air Act and how the EPA extended the rules to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Obviously going to cost a lot of money, but a necessary change to dodge climate disaster. That rule had to wait for Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act to become legal. Hopefully this minor consumer protection rule will be supported by Congress as well.
We are assuming the calculation for the number of companies affected is correct. If they are using a provider like Shopify or a WordPress plugin, the cost will only be to upgrade the plugin.
I don't know that the backend is necessarily needed. If the button only opened a support ticket/sent an email then the rest can be done by the employees who already processed cancellations on the phone. They just don't need to be on the phone with the customer to do it.
Exactly, currently at some point on page 10 of click-throughs, is the "real" cancel button, and essentially you just need to make that the "first" cancel button and link straight to it.
How many companies of "size" you know of? Because that process looks HORRIBLY inefficient and only primed to extract as much money of the consumer. You just need to put it in the account screen. A big red button. Your _workflow_ is there to make excuses. If the move was the other way, you would gladly pay the cost, but because it actually hurts your "business model" then it is suddenly a problem. No buddy, I call BS on all that, and call BS on the law itself.
So, you're holding a strong opinion about something that you're completed uneducated about and have no experience with?
ANY software change in a non-hobby business goes through a change process.
One as significant as an entirely new account cancelation flow requires extensive planning, design and testing.
What if you have equipment like a set top box? What if a shipping label needs to be mailed out? What if there are state-by-state regulations that must be complied with? What if you have to issue prorated returns of prepaid subscription fees? What if different accounts have different cancelation terms because of bulk pricing? And a million other things that you have to think about, design for and test.
Of course you can solve all this. But it's certainly not "BS" that it'll take more than 24 hours.
The FTC knew this. They cheated their process to ram through a rule. But you like the rule they tried to cheat to implement, so it's ok then, I guess.
For the types of issues we’re discussing here, we’re talking about companies making more than $50mm yearly, which is about 75-100 employees. So successful small businesses and larger. I don’t have exact numbers, but this size business is very common. Most professional programmers will have seen the issues I’m talking about.
Even a company of 100 people should have a change process. I work in infra mostly and to even shut down a VM that has already been decommissioned I have to go through a change process. You can't have a dozen IT/dev cowboys just doing things they think are fine on a whim because you have to take into account what all the other teams in the company are doing. We've got 30 people in our IT dept and change processes are absolutely crucial to not fucking things up on a regular basis.
Well, after you factor in some of these companies are probably large corps with layers of middle management. It will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
1. Not pegged at inflation, so the threshold is continually moving downward.
2. All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies to blow out the threshold. If you take the companies at their word, then you will never get under this threshold. Why trust them?
Yes, Congress should probably revisit the threshold. But all thresholds are arbitrary, and for this purpose a hundred million is arguably as good as any. It’s not the end of the world if they only do that every few decades. In fact I would argue that instead of being inflation adjusted, the threshold should be adjusted so that the FTC always has to do a review on some percentage of their new rules. But simplicity has a lot going for it too.
> All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies…
Keep in mind that this threshold is not about bad actors at all. It’s about the impact to the legitimate companies that are not defrauding people at all. The FTC estimated that there were over a hundred thousand companies that would be effected by these new rules, and possibly that there were 5× that. As the judge noted, the implementation cost of these new rules would have to be less than $1000 _per company_ in order for it to be below the threshold. That’s two days of an average engineer’s salary, or even less if they’re getting paid well instead of just average. And since the rules involve more than just adding a button to your webpage the work involved would need to be done by more than just an engineer.
And hitting that threshold is no bad thing, since it just means that the FTC has to allow an extra public comment period with the specific purpose of coming up with alternative rules. If any of those alternative rules would be effective but cheaper to implement then the FTC is supposed to drop their own rules and adopt the alternative rules instead. That keeps the cost down for the legitimate companies while still allowing the FTC to go after the illegitimate ones that aren’t going to bother following the rules anyway.
Don’t forget that the FTC’s new rules were about a more than just adding a button to your website. You should go read them, but be warned the pdf is 230 pages long.
But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do given that now it won't be done.
Right, if they were screwing over customers, we’d call it disruption and give them a medal, if not $1 billion dollars. Since they’re trying to help people, we wag our fingers at them.
Whistleblowers are almost always revealing information that they are legally prevented from revealing, otherwise you wouldn’t need a whistleblower. A simple FOIA request would suffice.
That’s obviously no justification, all corruption is in someone’s favour. Society functions by rules. Break those founding principles and you break everything.
I find it unproductive to assign emotion to such blatant corruption. I'd rather frame it as "That comissioner sees it to be in his personal best interest to not stop consumers being robbed by big corps."
“The commissioner sees it as important that his government department actually follows the rules as written down by Congress” seems like a fairer interpretation.
Congress literally wrote “You must do X when Y”, and the FTC said “Well, probably Y isn’t true anyway, so we can skip doing X”. It’s true that Y involves an estimate, since there’s no way to calculate the exact number, but their estimate was clearly cooked with the specific purpose of letting them rush.
The new rules seem like good rules, too, so it’s really a shame that they decided that it was more important to rush than to do it right. That makes the old commissioner a bungler at best.
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.
It's an authorized recurring charge. Disabling the card only really works for sure on new charges. The only 'real' way to deauthorize it is to convince the merchant to do it for you. Every other method is just creating enough friction that you hope it will be too expensive for the merchant to fight back.
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.
revolut and others still try to charge you, even if you cancel the VIRTUAL card. when you ask them, why and how they you do that, they say you have some sort of agreement for the subs. service and you need to end it on your own via them. Bank can't do that?? they said something like that to me. So they literally support the dark pattent side, not on your side obv.
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 are absolute minority that conscious about your financial
Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.
I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.
Deep deep minority. I'm similar to you, in that every dollar going in or out gets tracked and categorized, but due to a medical emergency I recently started helping an elderly family member with their finances (logistically, not monetarily) and was astounded that they just can't identify what the destination is for half (by value) of the money going out of their bank account (we're working on it...).
The issue is that many folks rely on and even manufacture financial illiteracy as part of their "business"
It's extremely easy to give people what they want: a quick way to cancel a subscription. It should be criminal to deliberately hide that action behind phone calls etc.
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.
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
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.
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
Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.
The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.
When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.
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.
Creating a "stop subscription" button within a bank/credit card interface but allowing companies to charge a breakup fee when that gets pressed seems like a recipe for a lot of people to get whacked by big breakup fees they didn't know about.
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.
Ok? It's worth self-sacrifice to push back against practices hostile to humanity, like credit. But conforming over a fucking gym membership just strikes me as spineless.
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.
That is false. The conservatives have made it clear that they support the rule, but it needs to be done right. The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the law?
> The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the law?
I hope you don't get accidentally deported to a foreign prison by those lofty conservatives who are SO concerned with following the letter of the law.
But yeah, when a far right court digs up a technicality that just happens to serve the corporate interests that line the pockets of those who appointed these judges well... that's the justice you must truly value.
I do not defend conservatives when they don't follow the letter of the law. Except perhaps in cases where the law itself is unjust - however that is not your argument here so we can ignore that. There have also been cases where I didn't understand the full law and so have had to change my mind once I realized what I'm missing - but that doesn't seem to be the case here either.
On topic is a violation of the law. It isn't just a technicality here either, it is a big deal that when there are large effects of a potential rule we ensure we take the time to figure out what the real effects of it are. There are all too often unexpected downsides to some rule/law and when those downsides are bad enough the results can be worse than the problem you are trying to prevent. (it might not be in this case - but time was not given to figure out if that is the case so we don't know)
If you follow this stuff enough, you know that any court worth it's salt can come up with justifications for any ruling it wants, that they are often dissenting opinions (statistically much less so in this, the most conservative court in the country), and that another, totally unrelated technicality will sometimes be 'discovered' by a subsequent court in subsequent appeals. I mean just look at the absurd acrobatics going on in the SC these days.
But I love the IDEA of then justice system you're pretending exists.
You're completely brainwashed, this is sad to see. You're getting fucked over as much as the rest of us, but instead of fighting back you're asking for more. Purely out of spite and hate for us. How sad.
> The conservatives have made it clear that they support the rule, but it needs to be done right.
They have _said_ that they support the rule. In recent years, conservative judges have said a number of things that don't hold up to any amount of scrutiny.
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.
Most gyms are over subscribed - if everyone who has a membership actually went to the gym they wouldn't have enough space/equipment for everyone. They would need to raise their rates to afford more. That is those who have a membership but don't go to the gym are subsidizing those who do go to the gym.
The more expensive gyms are not this way. They will let you cancel easily. They will often out of good customer service pause your membership if you don't visit at all for a month. However they cost twice as much and often have worn out equipment that a much cheaper gym would have replaced. As such if you really visit a gym one that makes canceling is hard.
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.
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.
The problem is that if the courts only follow the rule of law some of the time then one must consider the possibility that these selective applications of the law are in service of some extra-legal agenda, in which case the fact that this agenda occasionally aligns with the law doesn't change the fact that the judges are in fact operating with compete disregard for the law except as it occasionally offers the opportunity to cover up their real motives.
Sure, I don't disagree, my point is just that the solution is not to transition from "ignore the law most of the time" to "ignore the law all of the time".
Frankly I'd prefer the latter because that would take away their plausible deniability and make it obvious that the court has gone rogue.
I've seen this attitude an increasing amount over the past few years. I think it's the same thing that's responsible for the current US presidential administration.
There's this attitude of, "this thing is partly broken sometimes. We should make it all broken, all the time, and that will be better".
Is there this faith that some higher power will swoop in afterwards and replace the now completely broken system with something that's good?
I think the result will be, things will simply be much worse than they were before.
I don't want to make it all broken. I would much prefer it not to be broken at all. I would much prefer if the courts just followed the law all the time. But if it's going to be broke, if the courts are not going to follow the law, I'd much prefer they do it all the time so that it is obvious that they are not following the law, and then maybe people will notice and do something about it.
The real problem I think is that no one seems to actually want the courts to follow the law. Everyone wants the courts to bend the law to their own desires, and so everyone gives them a pass when they do this. And that's how we end up in situations like we are in now.
Doesn't mean much when "rule of law" is just a polite way of stating "for my friends everything, for my enemies the law"
It sort of does mean that. If the courts selectively rule in favor of one class, and we can’t do anything about it, then the best thing to do may absolutely be to encourage selective rulings against them.
I see why you say that, but I prefer the long term results of fighting against insane rulings when they're bad, rather than the long term effects of fighting for insane rulings on the occasions that I find them convenient.
I don’t think we can successfully fight insane rulings in the near future. It’s on the same order as getting money out of politics; disagrees completely with the current incentives of the system and would require a massive political push. It seems to me that the system is working as intended in allowing insane rulings, and that we should attempt to use that to our advantage, since the powerful absolutely will continue to do so and there’s basically jack shit we can do about it right now.
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.
The decision is not about whether Filburn violated the AAA, it's about if production quotas under the AAA are even constitutional.
Congress has limited powers, and one of those is to regular interstate commerce (The "Commerce Clause"). SCOTUS decided that production quotas counted as regulating interstate commerce, and was therefore constitutional.
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...
Do you not think that corporations are composed of people who have rights?
Is a corporation without any employees still a person?
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."
The 8th Circuit has an even more conservative composition than SCOTUS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
Case was decided by Loken (GHW Bush), Erickson (Trump), and Kobes (Trump).
In my country politicians do not appoint judges. The separation of the branches of power and all that...
But I will say that having independent justices who constantly fuck up your government plans can be exhausting.
> 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.
> Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong
I think the tense of this sentence is not quite right. Something more like "Make checks and balances strong again" would work.
Haha, ya I agree with that too
There are always reasons on both sides of a case
so, small questionable wins for normal people would break the system while big, veeeeerrrrry questionable wins for some subset of the elite are OK?
sure bud .. wake the fck up
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.
A few months added to all the subscriptions people are paying for and not using could easily surpass 100+ million in lost customer money. I'd still venture it makes sense to have a counter party looking at the financial harm to the public, and not just the companies.
$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
Seems that the hard coded fixed dollar amount argument can apply everywhere, see small claims court maximums.
Not to mention > $10K financial transaction disclosures
> I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation.
It's an utter mess. This job falls primarily to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who compiles the basket of goods that make up the Consumer Price Index - but this doesn't include food or fuel, for example.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis also maintains several indices which are used as inflation proxies when it's convenient (and which are most often used by the various working groups within the federal reserve system to, eg, determine interest rates). But these are somewhat more volatile and more subject to fluctuations due to international political affairs, etc.
The most obvious metric - the literal inflation in the money supply - is also tricky because the process by which money is created is so baroque.
The ability to have more coherent laws which reference amounts of money is a good reason to adopt sounder and more transparent practices in monetary policy.
I don't understand the point in raising these specific practical objections like my simple comment was intended to be the text of the legislation. There are all sorts of ways these issues can be addressed like pegging it to a specific index of inflation and have it run on a long delay to allow full transparency and predictability.
Wait, a stoplight costs $10 million?
No they don't. I'm not sure where they got that number from, but it's either wrong or being misrepresented (costs of entire infrastructure project confused with cost of lights). $10M is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude, depending on if you're counting installation of just one signal or a complete intersection.
It's conceivable for the installation of traffic lights in a remote place to be an expensive project if there's no power available there, but that's a much larger project than just a single traffic light.
I was thinking of a project that redid a four way intersection.
maybe that includes the software and hardware to run the stoplight, the salaries of the operators and maintenance etc and their admin staff, and the all the analysis to figure out when it should be red/green, all that stuff.
I had in mind a project in my area a few years back where redoing a four way major intersection was quoted like that, not actually one literal stoplight just purchased and delivered.
Depends where it is. On a military base they can be $100M.
No, it absolutely does not.
> 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.
Note especially that the hundred million dollar rule is about the amount of impact _of the new rules_, not the impact of the fraud that they’re trying to deter. The extra steps that they must go through are all about finding alternative rules that would be cheaper to implement, using suggestions from the public and the regulated industry.
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?
Why would anyone be concerned with the industry vs the economy? Especially when it’s an industry engaged in foul play?
Any dollar “lost” as a result of customers being able to cancel results in customers gaining more money to empower industries that are actually productive.
Obviously I agree with you morally speaking but apparently the law doesn't.
No, I think that the $100M number comes from the cost of implementing the change, not the impact to the impacted companies' bottom line.
I think the other person is right… the term is “economic impact” not “cost to implement”
That's what I thought too, but from the ruling in the article, it seemed like the justification came from calculating the cost to implement (emphasis on 'compliance costs'.
> But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said.
Well, the two are related. By definition, the economic impact must be at least as much as the cost to implement. So estimating the cost to implement sets a lower bound on the total economic impact.
No, it is only cost to implement the new rules. If this cost is estimated to be above one hundred million dollars, then extra review steps are required. These steps allow the public, and the regulated industry, to suggest alternatives. These alternatives must be evaluated to see if they would be both effective and cheaper for legitimate businesses to implement. If they are, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternative rules instead. This keeps the rules themselves from hurting legitimate businesses; the illegitimate businesses aren’t going to follow the rules anyway.
Sure, and I can make an argument that John's Window Breaking and Repair Services, LLC is performing a public good by stimulating economic activity.
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.
YEAH!
NO PART OF THE GOVT SHOULD EVER VIOLATE THE LAW!
YOU TELL 'EM, BUDDY!
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.
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.
>People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they
Europe is very far from being a single entity. Yet, SMS/RCS is popular enough, and in many countries WhatsApp is non-existent.
Actually I am european and use sms a lot. Dont even have WhatsApp installed... :)
Everyone has SMS, they may also have WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or whatever is popular in any given market, but everyone has SMS.
I don't think I get any corporate communication from WhatsApp it is all SMS. For chatting WhatsApp is popular, but companies just send SMS.
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.
Not even that. There's no rule in the GDPR to disclose the use of cookies. The regulation doesn't actually mention cookies at all, except maybe in an example. Instead, any data collection that's obviously required to do what the user requests (including session and shopping cart cookies) doesn't require any explicit consent. Only additional data collection, whether performed by cookies or any other means, requires consent.
That's why there are websites without cookie banners, like GitHub. It's not even hard to do that; it's just that most companies don't bother, because they know the EU will be blamed anyway.
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?
thats not the point I was answering.
The point is that it's 2 sides of the coin under regulation vs over regulation. And no system is ideal on both sides of Atlantic
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.
Plenty of well-meaning laws have unintended consequences. Intent does not absolve being the cause of the effect.
This consequence is 100% intended to fuck with the UX of your website, if your business model is tracking users.
And it accomplishes that goal. A lot of people on this forum are quite unhappy about it, but that's not because it's an unforeseen consequence.
Sure, but the cookie law is a bad example of it.
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.
The FTC have no say in choosing to exist or not exist, or what laws are passed that they are supposed to enforce. In some cases, an agency intentionally choosing to not carry out their duties would even be breaking the law and subject to penalty or punishment. How the FTC goes about interpreting their duties and then the court system correcting their behavior when they disagree or misbehave is the system working as intended. If they don't have laws to interpret for an issue though, that's a legislative problem.
The real question is why isn't congress doing their job? They control both the existence and funding of the FTC and additionally the laws the FTC are tasked with interpreting and enforcing. If congress is unfit for purpose they should be replaced.
While it’s correct to assert the FTC can’t choose to ignore its enabling act, it’s false to say: 1) the FTC has no say in the laws they are supposed to enforce 2) Congress controls the laws the FTC is tasked with enforcing.
As to 1, the FTC writes the laws it enforces. These laws are called regulations. As to 2, of course Congress could write laws that have to be enforced, but when it comes to regulatory agencies, Congress does quite the opposite. Instead of writing the laws concerning trade, Congress wrote an enabling act delegating this authority to the agency.
Calling for the replacement of a branch of government without understanding any of this would be avoidable with a better educational system.
>Calling for the replacement of a branch of government without understanding any of this would be avoidable with a better educational system.
I could be wrong, but IIUC, what GP meant by "If congress is unfit for purpose they should be replaced."
Is that we should vote the current congress-critters out of office and replace them with different ones -- who might actually do their job.
Even if we were to accept your premise (if broken, throw out), it's still Congress that decides whether the FTC exists or not.
The ftc isn’t supposed to create laws though. I tend to overshoot on the consumer’s side, but the ftc is overstepping with actions like this. There should be a law passed on this point and then ftc can enforce. Or ftc can sue based on existing law and let courts buy their interpretation.
> There should be a law passed on this point
Right; there was. We’d refer to that as the “enabling act” by which Congress delegates regulatory lawmaking authority to the FTC.
> The FTC isn’t supposed to create laws
You have deeply misunderstood US federal regulatory law.
> Or FTC can sue based on existing law
Yes; that’s the idea. Regulations are law.
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).
https://noyb.eu/en/eu-court-irish-dpc-must-investigate-noyb-...
https://archive.ph/20230123014444/https://www.irishtimes.com...
OK, from 2018 so they were even more under-resourced (if that's possible).
Additionally, the Irish DPC got involved from other data authorities, which may have caused delays.
That being said, they were dead wrong not to take on that case, as it was clear violation of GDPR. I actually worked for Meta/Facebook at this point and got drunk and bitched about this exact screen with one of their privacy lawyers. It was total non-compliance and should have been punished much harder.
Note also that the Hamburg DPA is crazy, they kept pushing compliants that were never supported by anyone else. I'm a little annoyed at noyb for not putting their complaints to the appropriate authority, but they appear to have learned better in the intervening years.
> https://archive.ph/20230123014444/https://www.irishtimes.com...
This on the other hand, is a work of opinion by a Berlin correspondent for a pretty poor newspaper. There probably is a bunch of pressure/lobbying on the DPC to avoid massive, massive fines which shouldn't happen but does everywhere.
The conceptual difference here is important. The goal should be to preserve privacy, not fine arbitrary large amounts of money. Like, sometimes you do need to fine people but personally I'd prefer auditing requirements for Meta/Google et al rather than fines.
I'm gonna need to think about this, tbh. I do have a certain amount of sympathy for the Irish DPC given the resourcing constraints and the size of their opponents. I'm not sure where the right balance is, tbh.
> The conceptual difference here is important. The goal should be to preserve privacy, not fine arbitrary large amounts of money. Like, sometimes you do need to fine people but personally I'd prefer auditing requirements for Meta/Google et al rather than fines.
I'm operating under the assumption that most tech giants (and in particular Meta) are doing everything in their power to keep violating people's privacy as long as they can get away with it.
Since it's impossible to audit everything such a huge corporation is doing and since cases can take a very long time to resolve (after which the damage is often already done), the huge fines are for scaring companies into submission. I am perfectly fine with that, no actually: I wish the fines were so big that they were actually threatening the business's survival.
> I'm not sure where the right balance is, tbh.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I think that Facebook simply shouldn't exist.
> I'm operating under the assumption that most tech giants (and in particular Meta) are doing everything in their power to keep violating people's privacy as long as they can get away with it.
This is a bad take. They want to make money and make the stock price go up (at the exec level) but lots of people there want to make good products (even in ads). Encouraging them to find less privacy invasive ways of doing this is probably a better approach.
> Since it's impossible to audit everything such a huge corporation is doing and since cases can take a very long time to resolve (after which the damage is often already done), the huge fines are for scaring companies into submission. I am perfectly fine with that, no actually: I wish the fines were so big that they were actually threatening the business's survival.
But it doesn't work. We've had GDPR for 7 years now, and while it's definitely made some things a lot better, I don't see much decrease in privacy invasion from the Big 2 (Google and Facebook). Depressingly, the biggest impact on privacy has been from Apple's anti-competitive ATT moves.
> I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I think that Facebook simply shouldn't exist.
Yeah, this is a wild take. Do you feel the same about Google who do basically all of the same stuff?
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.
When we “overshot left” it was by electing a centrist cishet man who identified as Christian and had different colored skin from the prior presidents.
Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
The dyad left-v-right is just stupid. The issues are complex. We must move under and out of the political bs of conservative v. liberal if we're gonna get anywhere.
While I generally agree with this framing, “whatever you call what’s currently holding the reins of power” vs. “not that” still feels useful currently; the empowered party and its ideology are pretty extreme.
Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
Take the stupid of the far right and idiots like Trump, then multiply through by -1. It presents differently but it'll still screw stuff up keeping the idiocy in cycle. There's morons on left too!
The middle ground is far, far preferred. Instiutional competency is much preferred. Course correction is preferred. Equal justice under law is preferred.
But as I say under the political noise is a larger problem: failure to balance control with accountability. Congress isn't checking Trump in any substantive way. The DOJ probably took too long to prosecute Trump. And on the right the housing crisis booked no jail time after a run of deregulation. Failure to respect due process or judges orders is another problem on the right. Forget outrage: where are the real world consequences?
Congress time and time again is directly implicated in many of these issues. If Congress was doing its job instead of pretty boys shadow boxing twaddle wedge issues for complex problems on TV, there'd be less of a power vacuum that Trump ultimately filled.
I think one would have to be nieve in thinking the left did not play a major part in its own demise 2016 and 2024.
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
They’re talking about those times we let women vote, implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow. Really overshot lol.
Ah yes, the period of slightly-less-suffering. What a monumental mistake on all our parts...
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
If it’s not America it will be China and I don’t think you want to live in that world.
It doesn't have to be China or any other country. It can be corporations who move to capture the governments in other countries the way they've done in the US.
Yes. My personal view is that the era of the nation-state is slowly ending and the era of corporate feudalism is beginning.
With their population pyramid I doubt it'd stay that way for long, though.
Why does it have to be China and why does it have to be any one country? Why can’t it be China, EU, and the US all having about the same influence?
But besides, with the rightward, populist/religious nut tilt of the US and corporations being able to bribe the President to get what they want without repercussions (Disney, Paramount, Meta, X, etc), I don’t see how the US is much better. All of the branches of government are giving power to the President that should be theirs.
Because there will always be someone with an advantage over the others.
Equilibriums in geopolitics are inherently unstable, states naturally compete for their own self-interest. No state will be willingly co-equal with another unless some actor with greater power forces it into that position.
To your last point, given the state of the US, it would probably be better for the world if the EU were on top at the moment. But they will not be.
While I’ve only personally spent a day in an EU country so far - a day trip from London to Paris last month (more coming over the years) - I would much rather see European values exported to the world than US values - lack of universal healthcare, gun violence, corporate takeover of government, anti-vax, anti-science nut cases, etc.
Depends on how far down the US is going to slide. It's sadly well underway to become much, much worse than China is (or will become).
It's not clear to me that China is batting that well. I do not wish bad upon the Chinese citizenry, and China has done well in its own day since the 1960s.
But don't forget at the same time where China was during the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions, nor the state control over the Chinese populace.
Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK, for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one country" rule the CPP landed on.
Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit different. It's got internal issues of employment, real estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full.
My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter to keep in mind.
China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense, but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
> US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich.
This and Citizens United.
I would too. If we agree that monopolies are bad for private industry, why isn’t it just as bad as having one world power. I think Trump and MAGA are uninformed idiots. But they have caused the EU to start building up their own military industry, countries to focus more on their own research and decouple themselves from the US. I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.
The US has given me all sorts of opportunities I wouldn’t have anywhere else in the world as a native born citizens. I plan to extract as much as I can from it and keep my eyes open to retiring somewhere else.
I continuously vote and advocate for policies like universal healthcare, pre-K education, etc. But what are you going to do when voters vote for politicians thst ars against their own interests - getting rid of FEMA when the states that need it the most are Republican, Medicaid, etc.
This isn’t a pie in the sky shrill “I’m leaving the US tomorrow”. But my wife and I already did the digital nomad thing domestically for a year starting in late 2022 and going forward starting next year, we are going to be spending more time out of the country in US time zones while I work remotely starting with Costa Rica.
And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US. However they have never seen any point - they mostly (not entirely) agree with the US and so it would be a waste of their limited time to do that instead of what they were doing instead.
> It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US.
Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped their independence. The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
> The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-European military alliance, they could have done so but instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.
Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European countries decided to basically gut their military budgets and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the fact that until very recently only a small fraction of the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget targets.
De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be gave up on the concept of military independence.
In the 1950s that was true. By 1960 it was already changing. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s Europe was plenty rebuilt enough that they could have redirected their efforts to opposing the US, but they mostly choose not to. Sure the US had a head start, but they have plenty of power. China is moving in the direction of opposing the US in the world, and seeing results.
> It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
well in the past year, we have stopped funding science in the US, arrested and deported thousands of foreign students here legally, removing the pipeline for the smartest people in the world to move to the US and start world changing companies, and started a trade war with the entire world, making American businesses much less competitive at buying/selling goods internationally.
to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing people in El Salvador
The US used to be run by people with the ability to think strategically, or by people who listened to educated people who could think strategically. The current US leadership either allows or endorses the capricious whims of an TV-educated idiot to consistently undermine national security and the most fundamental national interests. The complete and total mismanagement of the covid pandemic stands as a perfect example of the scale of the positively massive amount of preventable destruction being wrought presently. That’s just one out of many.
Hard to build high level stuff while the cities are flooding or burning, measles are spreading, the food is becoming toxic, the water is becoming undrinkable, out of control rogue agencies are kidnapping people indiscriminately off the streets, the literacy levels are falling precipitously, and a greater and greater percentage of the population struggles to buy food, much less healthcare or secondary education (or a useful primary education). You simply won’t have the talent pools required to do hard things at scale after a while. This is to say nothing of the complete unpredictability of the economics of supply chains, as incoherent economic policies are arbitrarily whipsawing tariffs around on a monthly basis. It becomes impossible to plan a year in advance.
You need some basic levels of functioning society and infrastructure and economy to build advanced institutions and structures and companies and technology. The US has been attacking its own society’s foundations for decades, and has recently accelerated the pace substantially.
I personally anticipate civil breakdown within a generation, certainly not continued technological innovation.
Corporations. European politics can be captured by large corporations the same way the US has been. It was unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere as well.
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.
The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy. Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.
"Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
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
Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?
I will give you 2 for the opposite: Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the time. Much higher bar than European regulators require.
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?
I would say things like cable and internet companies, as well as airlines. They are similarly frustrating in Europe but not to the extent that they are in the US and the difference comes down to better regulation.
For that matter I would say the tech regulation environment probably benefits European consumers with stronger data privacy rights, and a 14-day right to withdraw from digital contracts.
To be honest I don't think they do "no question asked refunds" for the consumer's benefit -- probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return requests they get.
I'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large expensive items.
>probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return
Sounds like a win-win then.
This isn't zero sum. Just because it's better for the company doesn't mean it's worse for the consumer.
Sure, but just because it's also pleasant for the consumer as a byproduct doesn't mean you can attribute their actions to that cause, e.g. this doesn't make them altruistic.
Have you ever tried to return something bought at a clothing store? I made that mistake once in France.
You’re creating an absurd standard “repeatedly return large expensive items” but even every day things are way easier in the US.
I think it's more about the type of store. I was with acquaintances returning clothes at high end stores (meaning: expensive) and service was great. I would not try that at a low end store (meaning: cheap).
From my point of view processing a return costs the store money. If they don't make a high margin they will (try to) discourage it. If in US everywhere they are fine with it for me it means they make higher margins everywhere.
Exactly. Europe’s regulations are about the absolute bottom, not intended to be taken as the average experience.
On average US companies are much better with customer experience. Of course until they corner you, then they may choose not to and then you have it worse than Europeans.
In the Netherlands literally every single store has no questions asked refunds for up to a month. Not that I have to do it often, but for example Coolblue and Bol both offer free returns within a month. Pretty much any webstore I have literally ever used has the same refund policies. Not to mention that the topic of this thread is already in-place EU wide, so there's an obvious win there too.
Isn't it best if you don't need refunds all the time ?
Ordering on French consumer shops I got exactly what I asked for, at a reasonable price in a reasonable time.
Product descriptions are actually helpful and there is little risk to get some fake product instead.
Amazon's customer support was incredibly helpful, but that's not what I want to pay for.
FWIW, I moved to AliExpress for the stuff I'm ok to gamble with.
The same is true for Europe. I've never had an issue returning items on Amazon, whether they're for personal or business use (where you don't have the right to return items). The same goes for local and European chains.
> Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the time
I'm not sure where you're getting your information about the EU from, but I can return any item I order online within 14 days, and then I have another 14 days to send it back, no questions asked, no need to give any reason. Some companies even offer 30 to 90 days, but the 14 + 14 days is the legal minimum.
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?
Xfinity comes to mind. The last time I bought a new modem, I had to basically yell 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally got to speak to a living, breathing human, who could provision the modem for me.
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.
This is everywhere in Europe
So it is sometimes better to buy stuff online, because the reasoning is that you haven't seen or tried them, but when you buy it in a physical shop, then you were aware what you bough and can't claim that you couldn't check the colour of a thing or how it fit you or whatever else reason you can think of.
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.
Why does it matter? As far as I can tell () the law asks the FTC to do an estimate, they did, and now the argument was ‘some one else thinks it’s wrong’. But does the law require an actual estimate?
If they are worried about this… either mandate some third party do the estimate, or mandate the study. This is just confusing.
() - of course I haven’t read the actual law or ruling yet…
The FTC did their estimate, it came out to less than $100 million so they, to their estimation were not required to take the additional steps of some types of impact analysis and the required comment period etc about it, the courts are disagreeing with the FTC and kicking the rule out. They only have to do that extra step when the economic impact would exceed $100m USD.
The main reason I think the court got it right is that with ~33 million businesses in the US you could argue that sending every business an email would cost them >$100 mil in just labor cost if they forward it a few times and several employees spend a reasonable amount of time reading it.
Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who do?
What's more interesting to me is the court is basically admitting that doing the right thing for customers will cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let this go ahead.
> Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who do?
This is quite correct. The FTC estimated that there are 106,000 businesses offering subscriptions to Americans. Those are the ones that would have to comply with the new rules.
A hundred million dollars is a lot of money, but divided by a hundred thousand businesses it suddenly is only $1000 each. Not actually that much! Since the new rules proposed by the FTC include a lot more than just a button on a website, complying with the rules would in fact require every one of these companies to do a fair amount of work. They’ll have to review all of their existing marketing material, and all of the forms that they use to sign up customers. They must ensure that all material facts are disclosed to every prospective customer, and that consent is obtained from the customer correctly.
Certainly these are good rules for businesses to follow, but the question now is the cost. Can your business review all of its marketing material for less than $1000? I doubt it. So the judge rightfully noted that the FTC’s estimate of the impact was insufficient.
And all they have to do as a result is to allow additional public comment on the proposed rules, with the specific intent to find alternatives. If these alternative rules would be just as effective but cheaper to comply with then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternatives. They had already done some of this in the earlier phases of the process, and the result was that several unworkable rules were indeed dropped. They could have spent a few more months doing the final review and analysis, but they decided to rush it through instead.
> What's more interesting to me is the court is basically admitting that doing the right thing for customers will cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let this go ahead.
I’ll say it again that this has nothing to do with how much the unscrupulous are getting away with, or whether it would cost the unscrupulous businesses anything at all. This is entirely about the cost to the legitimate businesses.
Why do you think the FTC analysis was more accurate than the opposing sides? The judges, of whom there were multiple, were going off of opposing side argumentation not just their own subjective opinion. That's how courts in the US work.
The companies suing to stop this have every reason to massively inflate the difficulty and cost of compliance to continue their long established dark patterns of trapping people in difficult to cancel subscriptions. Judges are not experts in the field and have a hard time evaluating the actual credibility of various presented estimates, you see it all the time with long debunked forensic evidence techniques being accepted still years later by judges and courts.
To figure out who's right, we would need to do research, rather than choosing the judges versus the FTC based on vibes.
I'm hardly going to do that research myself, so I have no opinion. There are legal bloggers whose opinions I'd respect. I assume comments on Hacker News are no more informed than my own, unless they show they have relevant expertise.
Why would this have any economic impact? These dark patterns don't generate any net value, they just move money from one pocket to another. The money will be spent somewhere else, instead.
The economic impact here is only factoring in how much it would cost companies to comply with the measure which is inherently designed to give an extra hurdle by not counting the money saved by consumers not trapped by dark cancellation patterns.
Right. It doesn’t count the money consumers save by not being trapped primarily because most businesses are legitimate. This threshold is all about identifying rules that are costly for legitimate businesses to implement and allowing them time to suggest alternative rules. If the alternative rules would be just as effective while being cheaper to implement, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules in favor of the cheaper alternatives.
Compliance and enforcement costs
Moving money from one pocket to another... is economic activity.
> "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
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.
Ruling on technicalities is their job. I don't like the outcome either, but they did their job and they did it well.
If we don’t want rulings based on technicalities, then don’t put technicalities into the law.
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.
Sure, but that's a different argument. OP wasn't carrying water for the companies that would be affected by this change, they were carrying water for the rule of law. If the FTC had sued saying that the $100M limit was too restricting and had no valid basis, then sure, this would be a valid argument. But the judges have to rule on the law as it's written, not as HN commenters would like it to be. Is the law wrong? Corrupt? Maybe! But that's a different conversation.
Believe me, I'm incredibly disappointed that this didn't work. I paid a Planet Fitness membership for a year after I had moved to a place too far away from any PF location to reasonably use it, just because the cancellation process was so convoluted that it took me ages to figure out how to cancel. I think that companies should be held liable when they employ predatory business practices like this. I agree with your premise, that the limit is too low and there's nothing to stop companies from lying about the cost to implement the rule. But the law is the law is the law is the law. Courts exist to interpret the law, and in this case, the law they were asked to interpret was whether the FTC had abided by the $100M cap. They found reasonable justification to rule that they had not.
Again, I get the desire to be up in arms over this. But recent events have shown just how fragile our legal system is when people decide that the rules can just be ignored, and I wish that people would be more hesitant to throw the baby out with the bathwater, even when doing so would mean I wouldn't have to pay planet fitness $20/mo for a year.
Tidy logical explanations of rule systems that click for people are very powerful when they come from authority. There’s a comfort in this sort of bureaucracy that appears to have taken broad considerations to protect us from complex dangers and second order effects.
^ 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.
I don't know what you mean by "narrow" here. It sounds like you're saying that they did it at the last minute, and failed to finish. But you're saying that since the next administration would "surely" never do click to cancel, that somehow should immunize the FTC from following their own regulations? The next administration was elected.
The reason they have to do studies is so they can't rush things through. We don't want them to be able to rush things through. They're creating law.
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.
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.
In the specific context of courts reviewing administrative agency rules, it’s largely true.
> 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.
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.
> There is no reason why the current FTC shouldn't implement it. It literally harms nobody except for businesses addicted to dark patterns.
Well:
> The FTC issued the proposal in March 2023 and voted 3-2 to approve the rule in October 2024, with Republican Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson voting against it. Ferguson is now chairman of the FTC, which has consisted only of Republicans since Trump fired the two Democrats who remained after Khan's departure.
That hasn't been true this century at the very least.
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...
Trying to extrapolate the behavior of people with $100 billion from the behavior of people with $5 million is clearly nonsense. That's as big of a difference as between someone who makes $20 million per year and someone at the global extreme poverty line of $2.66 per day.
Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.
More like “five richest people in the US according to their tax returns”. Nobody has counted the money of the Saudi Prince, the president of Russia, and a few dozen other characters like these.
Intuitively it feels like their wealth would eclipse Elon Musk.
Got a surprise for you if you think any admins in group isn’t the ultra wealthy
"this paper cut is exactly the same as sticking my arm in a wood chipper, which is why I chose the latter..."
I will use this in the future.
“It’s like a uniparty bruh”
Actually Republicans are like demons and Democrats are like angels, which is why their policies are so distinct. I am very sophisticated.
Can you seriously compare the administration building concentration camps, cutting medicare for 12 millions people (effectively killing a lot of them) and dooming America's future through insane spending to the previous administration?
I do not hold the democrats in my heart but claiming they're "both equally bad" is absolutely ludicrous.
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.
> You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.
We can get pretty close. Take Adobe versus Affinity. Same industry, very similar product suites, but totally different pricing strategies, and Adobe makes cancellation much more annoying.
There are plenty of examples of this if you keep your eyes open. I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't have an exact example to give you is because I'm under NDA and I don't watch most consumer retail enough to know.
>Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.
Tacit collusion becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain in any market with more than a handful of players. A different pricing strategy is one of the easiest ways to counterposition against an incumbent there is. It's part of how SaaS toppled bubble wrap CDs in the first place.
That can be lower pricing with the same model, or it can be a one time purchase versus a subscription, or it can be a hard to cancel but very cheap subscription over a very expensive one time purchase.
> In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content.
People are more willing to pay $10 per month with ads than $12 per month without ads. I don't find that especially shocking. The market figures out what people actually want, not what people say they want.
Say it were not so. Then we would see some Netflix renegades start a new streaming platform that is Ad Free Again™ and only a tiny bit more expensive than the competitors, and most consumers would switch. It's not impossible, but I haven't seen that happen yet.
>You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option.
If I care enough about the feature and this price differential, I'll notice this and eventually go through the aggravation of cancelling to switch to a new, slightly higher priced service which does have click to cancel. I paid more for the easy cancellation promise and when it was revoked the service became less valuable to me. Whatever, it was fun while it lasted. A monthly subscription to Netflix is not a marriage, and it is not an investment.
> You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.
It's not click to cancel, but... airlines will charge extra for the right to cancel with a refund. Cheapest ticket is non-refundable, higher priced in refundable. But these are finite resources - seats, dates/times, etc. Not infinite capacity SaaS platforms.
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.
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.
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.
Incorrect, strictly speaking I'm spending $20 on the option to visit the gym for a month, just like how you might sound $20 for the option of using Netflix for a month.
Options provide value to the purchaser even when they are not exercised. It is a common but grave error to model options the same way one would model a simpler pay-per-usage style service for that reason. We might as well start telling people they can't buy monthly bus passes if they don't use them every day.
But as I noted, there is nothing stopping you keeping that option. It is perfectly fine for you to pay for the option if you want to keep paying for it, even without using it. That is perfectly efficient. The inefficiency is when you want to cancel in order to spend the money elsewhere and you're unable to do so because the subscription is hard to cancel. At that point you no longer want the service, you want to spend your money on cakes, but you cannot.
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.
Then get legislation through congress to change it. The courts are not there to fix legislation unless it is superseded by other higher legal authorities. Such as the constitution national or state. Current legislation gives them corporations rights. If you think that is wrong then the way to change it is to get people elected who can change that legislation.
One of the key steps to get Congress to change things is to first get support from voters for the change.
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.
For example, in Switzerland you cannot cancel your landline or mobile phone subscription (at the two largest providers) without calling or chatting to customer support. They excluded "cancellation by mail/e-mail" explicitly in their terms of use.
I recently tried to cancel my landline and first they told me I could only cancel within 1 to 3 months up to the expiration, not earlier (which is clearly against any existing law).
Care to expand beyond a meaningless statement? What has your experience been?
Just that: my experience has been roughly the same in an EU country and the US: there was not some magical interface or customer-centric viewpoint the imbued everything by virtue of the EU.
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
That service doesn’t exist in Europe unfortunately, I have to use Revolut for that
doesn't stop it from being sent to collections.
wtf are ppl downvoting this. i had it happen to me.
I guess not; but I also use Privacy.com cards and have never ended up in collections when I pause a card to cancel a service.
once something is in collections, you can negotiate to pay a fraction of the original price. it's actually harder to do so before then.
or, you can just not pay even through collections. rarely does it impact credit score (much). lots of kinds of debt even legally can't (eg <$500 medical debt)
> you can negotiate to pay a fraction of the original price.
what gives you the negotiating power ? they can simply dock you on your credit report. thats what comcast did to me. they didn't care about negotiating
I think that is how collections work. When a business can't get you to pay they sell the right to collect it to another "collections" business (let's call it Y). Y pays a fraction of the amount owed for the right so even if they can get you to pay like 25%, they are still making a profit.
by that logic i should let every bill go to collections?
this assumes you're using it for a service that has your name/address/birthdate/social.
i use it for stuff like scammy dark pattern photoshop trials, and i can use a fake name and address.
i wouldn't use it for stuff like utilities or gym memberships that absolutely send stuff to collections and they deliberately collect your information to be able to do so
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.
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.
Except that no one would try to get a lawsuit, since the only ones with standing are the companies affected.
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.
Rules that give leeway to act when consumer costs are estimated to be above a certain threshold, instead of when company costs are below a certain threshold would be a much better, if still imperfect, rule that would satisfy the “correct direction in a useful way”.
Just off the top of my head, you could have a rule that if some business activity is estimated to cost consumers $100 million or more, then FTC can implement it instead of looking at the cost to companies. The “average US household” spends $200 a year on forgotten or unused subscriptions [1], if even 10% of those are due to a lack of click to cancel, that is $2.6 billion per year.
[1] https://thedesk.net/2025/05/cnet-subscription-survey-2025/
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.
The "other side" here is the political group that is consistently anti-regulation, anti-consumer, anti-government.
The "other side" does not consider themselves anti-consumer. You disagree with them on what anti-consumer means, but they have their own reasons to consider their position pro-consumer and you are doing debate a disservice by ignoring that.
They do consider themselves anti-regulation and anti-government in general, but they are not (mostly) anarchists, they do agree with some regulation and government, they just want the minimum possible and thus place a high bar on how bad the alternatives must be before they will agree to regulation/government.
Thanks for chiming in and pointing this out. I, too, am frustrated by the setback of this nullification.
In my original comment, I was talking about the general case for due process. "Progress" is almost as useless a category as "good" and "bad".
Debates have become astonishingly partisan.
Do they actually consider themselves pro-consumer, do they lie and say that, or do they keep quiet about it and let you assume that?
I for one was definitely speaking about the general case, not this particular case. My point was that due process is not, generally speaking, a bad thing - even if it means that "progress" is sometimes a little slow to come by.
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.
In general the better experience will command higher price, right. That is true, and by forcing same lowest level on everyone we are constructing artificial floor on how bad an experience can be.
Or at least ensuring that bad experience is so profitable that the competitor is ready to even pay the fee for violations.
Illegal markets operate in this territory. No consumer protection there, sorry.
I started to understand the question more, thank you for your comment
Always happy to facilitate deeper understanding, even when I disagree with you. No problem!
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.
Illumina, Tapestry, Kroger, Lockheed Martin would disagree.
Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?
There is a new FTC administration.
I interpret this as being the incoming FTC wanted to kill this but not withdrawal (due to bad optics).
They wanted to lose the case and did so by changing a judgment they controlled so that the rule could fail a legal procedural challenge.
It better fits the facts that the incoming FTC wants this, but they want to do the job right. At least some of the incoming FTC was in place when they rule was passed in the first place and their statements then say they wanted the rule but they wanted the correct procedures done so that it would stand up in court.
If they wanted to change how they implement the rule they could have withdrawn it rather than continue to an adverse judgement in court.
Basically the FTC is required to go through a lengthy (probably multi-year) impact analysis if they determine that the rule will cause more than $100 million in impact to the US economy.
The previous administration determined that this rule would not meet the threshold, allowing quick implementation. The current administration then said "actually we think this would meet the threshold" giving the court an excuse to strike the rule down.
If the trump administration is correct that trapping people in gotya-contracts by making it difficult to cancel really constitutes $100 million of economic activity in the US, I think that says that there's something truly rotten about the basis of our economy.
You would have attacked them for withdrawing the rule as well. You have setup a can't win situation and then are attacking someone for losing.
If Liberals really wanted this rule they would have followed the law. Evidence is the conservatives when this was passed objected because the law was not being followed. They were then left in this can't win situation.
I would have criticized them for getting rid of a rule that protects consumers, yes.
But it would have been far more honest than what they've done here, where they set up a kabuki theater legal defense so that they can avoid the bad politics of killing a very good rule to protect monied special interests.
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.
Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.
Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.
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.
It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.
Sure, 23 hours on average is generous if the goal is honest implementation. But the issue isn’t the time. It is that companies don’t want this button to exist at all. They are not stalling because it's hard; they’re stalling because friction equals profit. That’s why you get weaponized complexity, endless “design reviews” and inflated estimates. The FTC did their job, sort of. They got “cancelled” (hehe) because of a bureaucratic hurdle.
The industry just doesn’t want to play fair.
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.
This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.
The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.
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)
>Well, the "one click" cancel is hidden deep in the settings app"
no it's not, it's not even close to being deep or hidden.
It's 2 taps inside the settings app, or a single tap when searched from the system wide search bar.
>Most people don't understand that Apple is actually managing the entire billing process
Apple marks transactions as "apple.com/bill" which provides a straightforward way to view charges or request a refund.
Here's a list of things that require more taps than accessing Subscriptions:
1. Changing the wallpaper.
2. Making a phone call.
3. Collecting apps into a folder.
4. Setting an alarm.
Depending on training Apple support can submit refund requests.
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?
zombie purchasers is the business model of basically every gym. they lose money on the people that actually show up. the money makers are the people who sign up for a membership, go once or twice and then forget to cancel (or purchased a full year at once)
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
Why are you pasting the article when it doesn't include any warnings that were given to the ftc at the time?
It literally says they were warned by the administrative judge that a preliminary regulatory analysis was required to make such a rule.
> Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule,"
The fact that it takes more than 24 hours to put a 1 click cancel button is alien to me.
You must not work on these sorts of systems. It can easily take more than 24 hours. In case you’re genuinely interested in learning more, here’s how it works.
There are good reasons for it working this way, BTW. The needs of a company with hundreds or thousands of people are different than the needs of hobbyists and early-stage startups.
1. A user experience designer analyzes the user flow and decides where to put the cancellation button. They make decision about style, layout, and wording. This isn’t a ton of work, but something so critical to the company’s business and retention numbers will probably involve a lot of review, discussion, and bike shedding. This could easily take 24 people-hours of work on its own.
2. Somebody programs the front-end change. They probably have to put it behind a feature flag so it’s not visible until the back end is ready.
3. Somebody programs the back-end. They think about security, authentication, authorization, CSRF. That’s probably handled, but again, this is a critical feature and deserves extra care.
4. Somebody programs the interface to the company’s internal systems. They’re usually kind of a pain to work with. Billing, marketing, support, customer success. Something probably sends an email to the user. Maybe there’s a follow up flow to try to get them back with a special offer a month later. Etc.
5. The change is tested. Preferably with automated tests, but a feature like this has tendrils into systems throughout the company, and a lot of moving parts, so manual testing is also important. If it goes wrong, it’s a big deal, involving the potential for chargebacks and lawsuits, both of which are expensive at scale.
Throughout all this, you’re dealing with legacy code, because billing is one of the oldest systems the company has, and the one with the most risk of change, so the code is nasty and doesn’t follow current conventions. Every change is painful and tedious.
It’s alien to you that this could take more than 24 hours? At any company of size, I have trouble imagining it taking less.
Of course now that the FTC rule is well known, anyone designing a new system would require click-to-cancel. The new burden is low, but at the time the big companies probably spent millions to fix it.
A more extreme example would be the US Clean Air Act and how the EPA extended the rules to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Obviously going to cost a lot of money, but a necessary change to dodge climate disaster. That rule had to wait for Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act to become legal. Hopefully this minor consumer protection rule will be supported by Congress as well.
We are assuming the calculation for the number of companies affected is correct. If they are using a provider like Shopify or a WordPress plugin, the cost will only be to upgrade the plugin.
I don't know that the backend is necessarily needed. If the button only opened a support ticket/sent an email then the rest can be done by the employees who already processed cancellations on the phone. They just don't need to be on the phone with the customer to do it.
Exactly, currently at some point on page 10 of click-throughs, is the "real" cancel button, and essentially you just need to make that the "first" cancel button and link straight to it.
How many companies of "size" you know of? Because that process looks HORRIBLY inefficient and only primed to extract as much money of the consumer. You just need to put it in the account screen. A big red button. Your _workflow_ is there to make excuses. If the move was the other way, you would gladly pay the cost, but because it actually hurts your "business model" then it is suddenly a problem. No buddy, I call BS on all that, and call BS on the law itself.
So, you're holding a strong opinion about something that you're completed uneducated about and have no experience with?
ANY software change in a non-hobby business goes through a change process.
One as significant as an entirely new account cancelation flow requires extensive planning, design and testing.
What if you have equipment like a set top box? What if a shipping label needs to be mailed out? What if there are state-by-state regulations that must be complied with? What if you have to issue prorated returns of prepaid subscription fees? What if different accounts have different cancelation terms because of bulk pricing? And a million other things that you have to think about, design for and test.
Of course you can solve all this. But it's certainly not "BS" that it'll take more than 24 hours.
The FTC knew this. They cheated their process to ram through a rule. But you like the rule they tried to cheat to implement, so it's ok then, I guess.
For the types of issues we’re discussing here, we’re talking about companies making more than $50mm yearly, which is about 75-100 employees. So successful small businesses and larger. I don’t have exact numbers, but this size business is very common. Most professional programmers will have seen the issues I’m talking about.
Even a company of 100 people should have a change process. I work in infra mostly and to even shut down a VM that has already been decommissioned I have to go through a change process. You can't have a dozen IT/dev cowboys just doing things they think are fine on a whim because you have to take into account what all the other teams in the company are doing. We've got 30 people in our IT dept and change processes are absolutely crucial to not fucking things up on a regular basis.
Well, after you factor in some of these companies are probably large corps with layers of middle management. It will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
Which explains the issue with the law neatly:
1. Not pegged at inflation, so the threshold is continually moving downward. 2. All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies to blow out the threshold. If you take the companies at their word, then you will never get under this threshold. Why trust them?
Yes, Congress should probably revisit the threshold. But all thresholds are arbitrary, and for this purpose a hundred million is arguably as good as any. It’s not the end of the world if they only do that every few decades. In fact I would argue that instead of being inflation adjusted, the threshold should be adjusted so that the FTC always has to do a review on some percentage of their new rules. But simplicity has a lot going for it too.
> All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies…
Keep in mind that this threshold is not about bad actors at all. It’s about the impact to the legitimate companies that are not defrauding people at all. The FTC estimated that there were over a hundred thousand companies that would be effected by these new rules, and possibly that there were 5× that. As the judge noted, the implementation cost of these new rules would have to be less than $1000 _per company_ in order for it to be below the threshold. That’s two days of an average engineer’s salary, or even less if they’re getting paid well instead of just average. And since the rules involve more than just adding a button to your webpage the work involved would need to be done by more than just an engineer.
And hitting that threshold is no bad thing, since it just means that the FTC has to allow an extra public comment period with the specific purpose of coming up with alternative rules. If any of those alternative rules would be effective but cheaper to implement then the FTC is supposed to drop their own rules and adopt the alternative rules instead. That keeps the cost down for the legitimate companies while still allowing the FTC to go after the illegitimate ones that aren’t going to bother following the rules anyway.
Don’t forget that the FTC’s new rules were about a more than just adding a button to your website. You should go read them, but be warned the pdf is 230 pages long.
Because systematic corruption presumably?
More that they mistakenly thought that doing the right thing meant they didn't have to do the thing right.
But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do given that now it won't be done.
Right, if they were screwing over customers, we’d call it disruption and give them a medal, if not $1 billion dollars. Since they’re trying to help people, we wag our fingers at them.
>they were flouting required procedures
If you are sniffing out corruption, aren’t the ones flouting required procedures likely the corrupt ones?
Almost never.
Whistleblowers are almost always revealing information that they are legally prevented from revealing, otherwise you wouldn’t need a whistleblower. A simple FOIA request would suffice.
Kinda, but corruption in my favor is unlikely to see me complain about it.
That’s obviously no justification, all corruption is in someone’s favour. Society functions by rules. Break those founding principles and you break everything.
What if the “required procedures” are held in place by corruption?
who warned them?
A then-commissioner who is now the head of the FTC.
Ah so a Trump appointee and 2 judges appointed by Trump. Now that's a group I would never trust to follow the law.
That commissioner also hated the fact that consumers were going to stop being robbed by big corps.
I find it unproductive to assign emotion to such blatant corruption. I'd rather frame it as "That comissioner sees it to be in his personal best interest to not stop consumers being robbed by big corps."
“The commissioner sees it as important that his government department actually follows the rules as written down by Congress” seems like a fairer interpretation.
Congress literally wrote “You must do X when Y”, and the FTC said “Well, probably Y isn’t true anyway, so we can skip doing X”. It’s true that Y involves an estimate, since there’s no way to calculate the exact number, but their estimate was clearly cooked with the specific purpose of letting them rush.
The new rules seem like good rules, too, so it’s really a shame that they decided that it was more important to rush than to do it right. That makes the old commissioner a bungler at best.
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.
> 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?
It's an authorized recurring charge. Disabling the card only really works for sure on new charges. The only 'real' way to deauthorize it is to convince the merchant to do it for you. Every other method is just creating enough friction that you hope it will be too expensive for the merchant to fight back.
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.
revolut and others still try to charge you, even if you cancel the VIRTUAL card. when you ask them, why and how they you do that, they say you have some sort of agreement for the subs. service and you need to end it on your own via them. Bank can't do that?? they said something like that to me. So they literally support the dark pattent side, not on your side obv.
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
> You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial
Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.
I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.
Deep deep minority. I'm similar to you, in that every dollar going in or out gets tracked and categorized, but due to a medical emergency I recently started helping an elderly family member with their finances (logistically, not monetarily) and was astounded that they just can't identify what the destination is for half (by value) of the money going out of their bank account (we're working on it...).
Sir, sorry to inform, but you do this:
> I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into
You are a minority in a minority that tracks at all! ;)
Well, even just being autistic is already a minority.
The issue is that many folks rely on and even manufacture financial illiteracy as part of their "business"
It's extremely easy to give people what they want: a quick way to cancel a subscription. It should be criminal to deliberately hide that action behind phone calls etc.
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.
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
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.
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
Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.
The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.
When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.
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)
Adobe is an example where a yearly discounted subscription is billed monthly
They'll have to change their model or implement like a breakup fee depending of what would has been missed if you didn't have a discount.
Creating a "stop subscription" button within a bank/credit card interface but allowing companies to charge a breakup fee when that gets pressed seems like a recipe for a lot of people to get whacked by big breakup fees they didn't know about.
Cell phone plans often charge monthly but can be years long contracts.
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.
> If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.
Let them. I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.
> I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.
One reason is that the negative impact on your credit may end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars if you e.g. need to get a mortgage
Ok? It's worth self-sacrifice to push back against practices hostile to humanity, like credit. But conforming over a fucking gym membership just strikes me as spineless.
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.
That is false. The conservatives have made it clear that they support the rule, but it needs to be done right. The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the law?
> The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the law?
I hope you don't get accidentally deported to a foreign prison by those lofty conservatives who are SO concerned with following the letter of the law.
But yeah, when a far right court digs up a technicality that just happens to serve the corporate interests that line the pockets of those who appointed these judges well... that's the justice you must truly value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
I do not defend conservatives when they don't follow the letter of the law. Except perhaps in cases where the law itself is unjust - however that is not your argument here so we can ignore that. There have also been cases where I didn't understand the full law and so have had to change my mind once I realized what I'm missing - but that doesn't seem to be the case here either.
On topic is a violation of the law. It isn't just a technicality here either, it is a big deal that when there are large effects of a potential rule we ensure we take the time to figure out what the real effects of it are. There are all too often unexpected downsides to some rule/law and when those downsides are bad enough the results can be worse than the problem you are trying to prevent. (it might not be in this case - but time was not given to figure out if that is the case so we don't know)
If you follow this stuff enough, you know that any court worth it's salt can come up with justifications for any ruling it wants, that they are often dissenting opinions (statistically much less so in this, the most conservative court in the country), and that another, totally unrelated technicality will sometimes be 'discovered' by a subsequent court in subsequent appeals. I mean just look at the absurd acrobatics going on in the SC these days.
But I love the IDEA of then justice system you're pretending exists.
You're completely brainwashed, this is sad to see. You're getting fucked over as much as the rest of us, but instead of fighting back you're asking for more. Purely out of spite and hate for us. How sad.
> The conservatives have made it clear that they support the rule, but it needs to be done right.
They have _said_ that they support the rule. In recent years, conservative judges have said a number of things that don't hold up to any amount of scrutiny.
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
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.
WaPo was easy when I canceled last November. The lost time I canceled a NYT subscription, it still required a phone call.
They say it requires a phone call but amazingly an email that's says you will charge back any future charge works too.
Almost like they can do it without the phone or something.
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.
Most gyms are over subscribed - if everyone who has a membership actually went to the gym they wouldn't have enough space/equipment for everyone. They would need to raise their rates to afford more. That is those who have a membership but don't go to the gym are subsidizing those who do go to the gym.
The more expensive gyms are not this way. They will let you cancel easily. They will often out of good customer service pause your membership if you don't visit at all for a month. However they cost twice as much and often have worn out equipment that a much cheaper gym would have replaced. As such if you really visit a gym one that makes canceling is hard.
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