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

(www.ftc.gov)
1737 points pseudolus | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Uehreka ◴[16 Oct 24 15:57 UTC] No.41860626[source]▶
When people try and say that regulating stuff like this is impossible, I often think about how unreasonably great the regulations around “Unsubscribe” links in emails are.

There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the link) I’m either immediately unsubscribed from the person who sent me the email, or I’m taken to a page which seemingly MUST have a “remove me from all emails” option.

The level of compliance (and they can’t even do malicious compliance!) with this is absurd. If these new rules work anything like that, they’ll be awesome. Clearly regulating behavior like this is indeed possible.

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1. dmix ◴[17 Oct 24 14:15 UTC] No.41869894[source]▶
Not being blacklisted as spam is a huge market based incentive to add unsub links.

A major reason for the mass adoption is that most companies use email services because running your own marketing email servers are extremely difficult. And those companies don't allow you to send emails without one to protect their own email servers in addition to following the various laws in different countries. It's easier to get compliance via these larger companies, particularly when it naturally aligns with market incentives.

Regulating a million niche SaaS sites each with an individual custom payments page may be quite a bit harder. But maybe stuff like Stripe will make it easier as a proxy for this regulation.