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FTC announces "click-to-cancel" rule making it easier to cancel subscriptions

(www.ftc.gov)
1737 points pseudolus | 7 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.01s | source | bottom
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ajkjk ◴[16 Oct 24 14:37 UTC] No.41859541[source]▶
There are so many things like this that have needed fixing for such a long time. The fact that something is happening, even slowly, is so heartening.

If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.

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TheCraiggers ◴[16 Oct 24 14:41 UTC] No.41859610[source]▶
Agreed. The fact that multiple companies are springing up with the main selling point being "help you cancel subscriptions you thought you already cancelled" should be a wake up call to the legislature that this problem has gotten out of hand.
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pc86 ◴[16 Oct 24 14:49 UTC] No.41859715[source]▶
I think a great function of elected representatives would be keeping an eye out for these types of businesses that are societal "code smells" indicating something is wrong, and looking at the regulatory and legislative environment to see what would be changed to make those businesses obsolete.
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1. pbhjpbhj ◴[16 Oct 24 15:56 UTC] No.41860619[source]▶
Those who are pro-market probably consider the companies cropping up to be evidence that legislation is not needed (as the market is addressing the issue). I'm not such a person, fwiw.
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2. tantalor ◴[16 Oct 24 16:09 UTC] No.41860789[source]▶
Broken window fallacy
3. pc86 ◴[16 Oct 24 16:10 UTC] No.41860793[source]▶
I would definitely consider myself pro-market, and "market > government" has proven itself a pretty good default time and time again. That doesn't mean nothing should ever be regulated.
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4. floatrock ◴[16 Oct 24 16:24 UTC] No.41860967[source]▶
yeah, it's a failure mode of the open market. "We've allowed services to exist that unnecessarily cost you money so the solution is more services that will take more money." If we're being honest, at some point the golden cow of Efficiency is undermined.

The societal ethics of Ozempic are an example of this. We've created policies and subsidies that flood the food market with unhealthy processed food to the point that the cheapest option is an unnatural amount of calories (compare US obesity rates to the rest of the world), so the solution is a pharma product that takes an additional cut of your wallet. It's an expensive solution to an expensive problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.

The software analogy is it's always easier to slap on one more piece of duct tape tech debt than to do the difficult thing and refactor the whole thing (acknowledging that part of the refactoring difficulty is you're not guaranteed to end up in a better state than you started from...)

5. choilive ◴[16 Oct 24 16:35 UTC] No.41861067[source]▶
I don't think any free market capitalist outside of the most extreme libertarians think that markets should be completely unregulated. It is well known that free markets have areas where they are market failures or can never be Pareto efficient. Basically any "tragedy of the commons" type scenario is such a case. Unfortunately governments like to get their grubby fingers into everything and try to regulate their way out of problems.
6. gosub100 ◴[16 Oct 24 16:48 UTC] No.41861199[source]▶
The do-not-call list was created under Bush 2, right?
7. ElevenLathe ◴[16 Oct 24 17:32 UTC] No.41861590[source]▶
More pragmatically, the fact that such a business exists might be a sign that we're too late to regulate this. Now there is a constituency who can use the profits from keeping the system broken to lobby to keep the system broken. Look at TurboTax as an example, or defense contracting reform, or the affordable care act. Within the rules of neoliberal capitalism, you can't really use the government to address problems that somebody somewhere is making money from.