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

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.

Unsubscribe links are a fantastic regulation, but there is a workaround. I must have received at least a dozen emails from Brown after graduating despite unsubscribing to every email they sent.

The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually.

They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.

So I'm getting these emails from the KamalaHarris campaign. They're signed by the domain as well. I've never given money to the organiation, I'm not connected with their party, I've never signed up for the campaign, or interacted with them. However, I'm constantly being put on their mailing list soliciting for donations.

I've seen how the campaigns pass around email addresses without consent. (Mostly from ActBlue) So I'm concerned about validating an email address via unsubscribe.

I've reported this to abuse at sendgrid, and now sparkpostmail. They're shopping for email services.

Proof of org spamming:

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; dkim=pass header.i=@e.kamalaharris.com header.s=ak01 header.b=kJamWIyP; spf=pass (google.com: domain of bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com designates 168.203.32.245 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com; dmarc=pass (p=REJECT sp=REJECT dis=NONE) header.from=e.kamalaharris.com

Unfortunately political parties have more of a free pass on this as Republicans sued providers for their emails getting caught up in spam filters around 2022 (Who would've thought continuosly emailing people who click unsubscribe on your emails who then start reporting as spam would get you put on spam lists). Now political parties (and some bulk providers) have special tools to bypass rejection with some providers as a compromise.

I'm actually amazed at this because it seems to be the first time he Democrats are actually taking advantage of all the loopholes the Republicans made, rather than trying to take the high road.

It's not the first time, you're just patronizing the news outlets that tell you when the Republicans do something untoward but not when the Democrats do instead of the ones that do the opposite.

Also, as a general rule politicians will carve themselves an exemption to any rules they put on everyone else. For example, CAN SPAM applies to commercial email.

No, from Super PACS (they were the Citizens United in _Citizens United_) to gerrymandering the Republicans do it first and worst. It's not even close. It's nice to think "both sides" but it's misinformed.

Gerrymandering is entirely bipartisan:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-ma...

https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerryman...

There is three times as much outside money going to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency as the Republican one:

https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_candidate

You may have misread "first and worst". Democrats eventually follow suit, but the cherry picked example of CA doesn't account for the partisan overrepresention of Republicans in gerrymandrered congressional districts. It's not even close on a national level.

For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore.

Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.

> the cherry picked example of CA

California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population.

> overrepresention of Republicans

That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs.

And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote.

> this is from Citizens United

That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.

Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media.

Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.

> [Citizens United] was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.

Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people would disagree with as "pretty clearly correct" and stating an alternative as if it is the only alternative, that is not what many people think the alternative would be, is only going to raise hackles. It's not going to spur any new thought or interesting dicussion.

Unfortunately, many knowledgeable and intelligent people have failed to look into CU from any angle other than the one it is usually presented from: that is is about corporate spending on elections.

Which it is, but as the GP described, it's about a lot more than that.

I happen to think it was incorrectly decided - SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending. It would have left the door open to not-for-profit corporations still being free to spend money on e.g. publishing a book about a candidate within some date of an election, which is precisely what we want not-for-profit civic organizations (which are, you may recall, also corporations).

However, it really is "pretty clearly correct" that had SCOTUS simply ruled that "no corporation can <X>" (for various values of X), we would be an extremely different and probably much worse situation than we were before CU. Whether it would be worse than the one we're in post-CU is hard to say.