Seems like an almost intentional mistake tbh
> 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-...
Were you expecting respectable and proper jurisprudence? I'm not any more.
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.
Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and that will probably be sufficient.
From the abstract:
…the Commission failed to follow procedural requirements under § 22 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”), 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1)
The Commission’s formal rulemaking authority is found in § 18 of the FTC
Act. Section 18 authorizes the Commission to adopt “rules which define with
specificity acts or practices which are unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or
affecting commerce” within the meaning of § 5, as well as “requirements prescribed
for the purpose of preventing such acts or practices.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(a)(1)(B)
(emphasis added).
…
Besides the specificity and prevalence requirements, § 18 requires a number
of procedural steps, some of which go beyond those required for APA notice-and-
comment rulemaking. The FTC must first publish an “advance notice of proposed
rulemaking” containing “a brief description of the area of inquiry under
consideration, the objectives which the Commission seeks to achieve, and possible
regulatory alternatives under consideration.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(b)(2)(A). Also
required is a notice of proposed rulemaking “stating with particularity the text of the
rule, including any alternatives, which the Commission proposes to promulgate, and
the reason for the proposed rule.” Id. § 57a(b)(1)(A). Interested parties must be
afforded the opportunity for “an informal hearing” and to “to submit written data,
views, and arguments” on the proposed rule. Id. § 57a(b)(1)(B)-(C), (c).
Congress further required the Commission to conduct regulatory analyses of
proposed and final rules, or amendments to rules, at two stages of the rulemaking
process. First, when the Commission publishes a notice of proposed rulemaking, it
also must issue a “preliminary regulatory analysis” containing “a description of any
reasonable alternatives to the proposed rule which may accomplish the stated
objective of the rule” and for the proposed rule and each alternative, “a preliminary
analysis of the projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other
effects, and of the effectiveness of the proposed rule and each alternative in meeting
the stated objectives of the proposed rule.” 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1)(B)-(C).
Second, the Commission must issue a “final regulatory analysis” when it
promulgates a final rule. 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(2). Similar to the preliminary
regulatory analysis, the final regulatory analysis must include a description of
alternatives considered by the Commission and an analysis of projected benefits and
adverse economic and other effects. The Commission must also provide “an
explanation of the reasons for the determination of the Commission that the final rule
will attain its objectives” and a “summary of any significant issues raised by the
comments submitted . . . in response to the preliminary regulatory analysis.” Id.
§ 57b-3(b)(2)(B)-(E). Importantly, the preliminary and final regulatory analysis
requirements do not apply to “any amendment to a rule” unless the FTC estimates that
the amendment “will have an annual effect on the national economy of $100,000,000
or more.” Id. § 57b-3(a)(1)(A).
The FTC had opted out of doing those analyses on the basis that the new rule would have an annual impact of less than a hundred million dollars. The court however notes that this is quite unlikely:
Based on the FTC’s estimate that 106,000 entities currently offer
negative option features and estimated average hourly rates for professionals such as
lawyers, website developers, and data scientists whose services would be required by
many businesses to comply with the new requirements, the ALJ observed that unless
each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the
lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates, the Rule’s compliance costs
would exceed $100 million. Such an estimate was “clearly unrealistically low
inasmuch as there are several new requirements proposed that would require changes
in existing practices and/or disclosure forms.”
Section 18 of the FTC Act directs that a reviewing court “shall
hold unlawful and set aside the rule” if it finds agency action to be “without
observance of procedure required by law.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(e)(3); 5 U.S.C.
§ 706(2)(D). “The ordinary practice is to vacate unlawful agency action.” United
Steel v. Mine Safety & Health Admin., 925 F.3d 1279, 1287 (D.C. Cir. 2019).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.
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.
I'm happy to consult on this with all those poor businesses for under $100,000,000 in order to help the court vibes feel like the cost isn't over the limit.
I feel confident I can affordably write a few whitepapers and design guidelines to help these poor folks out as they research if there should be a cancel button and if it should work.
If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be switching immediately.
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.
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).
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.
Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum, especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.
But if you don’t like the rule, talk to your local Congresscritter and ask them to propose a bill to amend or remove it. Complaining about it in snarky internet comments isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Gotta laugh at the threshold being USD100M costs to the affected businesses without the law taking into account how much the annual costs to consumers are, assuming the continuation of the practices.
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
The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.
Bush 41: 2
Bush 43: 6
Obama: 1
Trump: 4
oh
There will always be the suspicion of political bias, and the haphazard way the administrations ever since Obama went in how nominations were done adds more fuel to the fire.
Almost like they can do it without the phone or something.
Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?
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.
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.
No they aren't. The ease with which you can continue to charge consumers without providing value to them directly affects the total amount of those charges (also, profits is a variable)
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
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.
Those costs are definitely going to be passed along to the consumer in some form or another. Fewer sales, fewer discounts, higher subscription prices, higher advertising prices, thinner magazines, it doesn’t matter. It all flows down to the consumers in the end. I don’t see how you can argue that these costs _can’t_ be passed down to the consumers.
And it’s definitely going to cost more than $1,000. The FTC estimates that there are over a hundred thousands entities offering subscriptions of some kind to customers in the US. 100,000 × $1,000 = $100,000,000. That’s the threshold beyond which rules changes need additional review.
This is _not_ the same as using the Apple credit card for a subscription.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Let them. I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.
that's happen more often than you think
also financial illiterate is real
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.
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.
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 cost of allowing people to cancel subscriptions is more than the cost to implement a button.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
Maybe you saw something in the quoted text that I didn't but I understood the USD100M to mean the costs that would arise due to companies who are currently utilising these practices stopping those practices. There's not an ongoing cost to those companies unless you call the deprivation to them of the revenue they shouldn't be receiving because their customers no longer wish to buy the service a cost.
> After all, those costs are eventually going to be passed down to consumers
And when they are the consumers will be able to stop buying off those companies, well, I mean, as long as they can cancel their subscription.
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.
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.
That line of cyber security mumbo jumbo does not inspire confidence
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
this does not track with my experience
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
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.
> 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,"
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.
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.
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.
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'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large expensive items.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
By putting process in place for rules we give us time to notice bad rule proposals and give us a process to stop them.
The industry just doesn’t want to play fair.
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.
You’re creating an absurd standard “repeatedly return large expensive items” but even every day things are way easier in the US.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think we may have drastically different understandings of what “the law” is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bringing up the boogieman of the left while the right is literally doing their best to bring the law under their heels permanently is pretty rich.
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.
Regulating the “public health, welfare, and morals” is the prerogative of state legislatures. So the question is whether there is anything in the constitution that overrides that general power. Resort to “emanations from penumbras” is a concession that there isn’t.
By the way, this isn’t even some U.S.-centric take. The constitutional law in most western democracies leaves regulation of drugs to the discretion of the legislature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can’t even parse this sentence. You appear to be assuming a dishonest magazine company, rather than an honest one. The hundred million rule is there to protect the honest companies from overly–complex rules brought about in an attempt to eliminate dishonest ones, so starting with a dishonest one is irrelevant. We know that they are not going to comply with the rules to start with, so the cost to them is irrelevant.
And profits are always variable, but that doesn’t matter. No matter how much or little your profit margin happens to be, increased costs can always be passed on to the consumer.
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.
The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.
(unfortunately, this seems necessary here on HN)
HN guidelines ask that you say "The article mentions that".[0]
I don't have any problem with the rule, which is why you dont see me arguing against it. I'm also not trying to change the laws by commenting on hn so your advice to not comment and instead call my reps comes off as pretty rude.
I do have a problem with the bad faith take of it costing a bunch of money to pay lawyers and data scientists in order to figure out how to "make it possible to cancel" including things like the examples of cancel buttons that literally don't work. Bad faith from the courts to undermine consumer friendly rules is worth discussion.
You may disagree with that and that's fine - happy to see a good faith response from you (but your goalpost moving requirement of updating all marketing doesn't meet the bar for me there) about why that cost might be higher than I expect. That might be an interesting convo.
this is Bad, Actually
This is red-baiting.
> while the supreme court runs roughshod over current law
This is question-begging.
> We need these stout champions of conservatism because the left is so crazy that we need to check them, that's why we need to rewrite the constitution to fit whatever trump is doing this week, right?
This is straw-manning.
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.
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.
No, Congress put in the hundred million rule to protect honest companies from overly–complicated rules meant to weed out the dishonest. The analysis is intended to force the FTC to consider alternative rules and pick the simplest one that will work.
As you point out, the dishonest companies aren’t going to bother following the rules, so new rules don’t impose any costs on them. Even Congresscritters can understand that.
> I would have hoped that, as well as considering what the costs are to the suppliers, the law might also have taken into account the size of the injury being suffered by consumers…
Yea, there’s an argument to be made in favor of that. You could contact your local Congresscritter and ask them to propose an amendment, but I would first consult the Congressional record to read up on the debate at the time the law was passed. I am sure something like this would have been proposed, and it might be useful to know why the law ended up the way it is. It might just have been simpler to get everyone to agree to a number than to a formula. Eliminating unnecessary complexity is the point, after all. I think this section was last amended in 1980, but I might be wrong…
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 didn’t move the goalposts here. The new rules that are at issue here were about much more than just providing a button that cancels your subscription. See the actual text of the amendment to the rules <https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p064202_negativ...> if you don’t believe me. But I’ll quote the summary here:
The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC” or “Commission”) issues final amendments to the Commission’s trade regulation “Rule Concerning Use of Prenotification Negative Option Plans,” retitled the “Rule Concerning Recurring Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Programs” (“Rule,” “final Rule” or “Negative Option Rule”). The final Rule now applies to all negative option programs in any media, and, among other things, (1) prohibits misrepresentations of any material fact made while marketing using negative option features; (2) requires sellers to provide important information prior to obtaining consumers’ billing information and charging consumers; (3) requires sellers to obtain consumers’ unambiguously affirmative consent to the negative option feature prior to charging them; and (4) requires sellers to provide consumers with simple cancellation mechanisms to immediately halt all recurring charges.>"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.
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?
This is just an obvious lie.
They're not supposed to, but they obviously do. Usually against common citizens' interest.
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.
This nullification does not serve the best interest of consumers unfortunately.
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.
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 hold the democrats in my heart but claiming they're "both equally bad" is absolutely ludicrous.
You can appeal to the system that I am actively saying is not working but you get the benefit of “well the law/eatablishment says so.” You can lean on your opinion or the results, whichever serves you better, in a way I can’t as you cite the case itself. The entire discussion is poisoned out the gate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
[0] https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024
[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
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.
Sorry bro I had to
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'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.
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.
Maybe? But this wasn't the supreme court: "...was vacated by the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit."
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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…
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
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
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.
Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.
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.
But I love the IDEA of then justice system you're pretending exists.
Had you truly preferred not being informed, not being allowed to opt-out?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> 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.
Intuitively it feels like their wealth would eclipse Elon Musk.
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.
It'd be interesting/debatable if this was a "look, this was never legal- now we're just painting a bullseye on people doing it- the 100m impact isn't needed" And the judge went with 100m impact anyway. But that's beyond what I know or care to participate in past throwing it out there as a talking point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
If your question is whether I think the Griswold was correctly decided, the answer is obviously not. Regulating access to medications obviously falls within the police power of state governments, and I don’t think the constitution has a special carve out for particular types of medications. In fact I think this was an extraordinarily easy case as a legal matter, and the fact that the Supreme Court got it wrong demonstrates how intellectually sloppy a lot of mid-20th century precedent was.
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.
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.
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.
There is reasonable room for disagreement about "what they're always supposed to do." Legal pragmatism is a prominent theory in American law.
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 you support that right at all beyond contraception (and abortion)? For example, do you support my doctor's right to prescribe to me all the pain medication that he and I think is appropriate for my painful, terminal disease? Or to prescribe me LSD or other hallucinogens to treat my PTSD?
It seems to me that Griswold should be invalidating most of the role of the FDA, except in an advisory capacity. But I don't think that's what most people who were aghast at overturning Roe believe.
Would you have been willing to allow, say, Texas or Tennessee, to decide that their resident doctors could tell their patients that there was no need for taking the COVID-19 vaccine, or to wear masks, or social-distance; and there could be no repercussions against patients for exercising those rights?
Support for the arguments Roe was based on seems to be highly dependent on where you want to apply those arguments. That doesn't seem very intellectually honest.
Historically, it's been the position of the Left that the Constitution should be treated as a "living document" to be interpreted in context of the needs of the times. It's been the Right who have rejected such interpretations and insisted on "originalist" or "textualist" interpretations of the document.
Now, Trump and other politicians are bags of wind who say whatever is expedient. But if you look at the Courts and what they've done for the past half-century, it should be clear that the work of the Federalist Society and the justices they've cultivated really has been in that originalist/textualist vein, and it's been the Liberal justices who have strained interpretations of the Constitution.
The Left idea that we need to hew to the Constitution is a VERY new change in American politics. And from where I sit it seems rather disingenuously targeted solely at defeating Trump. I'm not seeing anybody on the left saying, "you were right about the 2nd Amendment, and we should all be critical of California and Illinois and NYC for trying repeatedly to circumvent the courts' orders."
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.
NO PART OF THE GOVT SHOULD EVER VIOLATE THE LAW!
YOU TELL 'EM, BUDDY!
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.
It all done in bad faith and an instant black mark against any company.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
Case was decided by Loken (GHW Bush), Erickson (Trump), and Kobes (Trump).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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
Your comments these past months seem to evince an extreme textualist view of the Constitution's limits on government power.
Would it be fair to say that, in your view, a state government can take whatever action it wants, so long as the action isn't literally prohibited by the text of the Constitution? (In other words, for state governments, anything not prohibited is allowed?)
I'm curious: What's your view of the doctrine that under the 14th Amendment, state governments must comply with the Bill of Rights to the same extent as the federal government?
You periodically mock "emanations from penumbras" — is it your view that the phrase has more significance than simply a figure of speech to communicate the underlying concepts? (I have my own issues about Justice Douglas's track record, but that's not one of them.)