US court strikes down 'click-to-cancel' rule designed to make unsubscribing easy

There are two types of people:

Those who think the Supreme court should rule based on the effect on people.

And those who think the Supreme court should rule based on the laws as written.

>the USA's supreme court

OK, but right now we are talking about a decision by a US federal appeals court.

not all people of course, just say 99%... the bottom 99%

[flagged]

    The US court of appeals for the eighth circuit

Silly me

Courts in general, perhaps?

This might be a better link, with some deeper dive into where the panel of 3 judges disagreed with the FTC over some language about procedural requirements.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/us-court-cancels...

I have seen no evidence that the second kind of people exist. Only different groups for the first kind (here, real people vs corporate people).

>“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,”

Sounds like they have no issue with the rule itself, only with the fact that it was passed by bureaucratic fiat.

Part of the US Federal Court. The Supreme Court, which is another part of the US Federal Court, might eventually overrule today's decision.

and other HN readers working on LLM powered bots to write the replies

Textualists are like objectivists and rationalists in that they think calling themselves such names makes them true, when it's just window dressing for "I think my opinions are Fact™ and you're dumb if you think otherwise"

And others working a paid service that uses LLMs to automatically chat with cancellation service AI bots.

I’m pretty sure that it’s already a long-standing rule that unsubscribe must be available within 2 click (one click on the email, one click on the ensuing website). How often this is enforced idk

That's unsubscribing from an email list, not a paid subscription

It’s not. It’s impossible to cancel Sirius satellite radio. The button exists but has never worked

And all of those purely coincidentally and for no selfless reason at all came to the conclusion that such a law isn't needed.

Don't give them ideas!!!!

But in this vein, maybe if you can get the chatbot to disgorge its secret then you get to unsubscribe.

I hear disputing credit card transactions are a thing, though.

It's sad that this is almost a guarantee. Our peers are working on code at this very minute to annoy and frustrate us, and they seemingly have no problem with it.

There was an ad here for jobs at a company building AI powered debt collection robo calls. So this can’t be far off.

Being trapped in a kafkaesque nightmare isn't fiction anymore, it's late-stage capitalism's fetish.

I have been getting charged $7.99 from Google every month for a year. I don't know what the charge is and it isn't linked to any of my accounts. I have contacted every single possible Google support line that exists to the public. They refuse to provide any means for me to show them I own this credit card and that I want the charges stopped. But of course, my credit card company also has no human support rep, and their automated support line tells me I need to talk to the merchant. So I cancelled the card. Guess what? They're still processing the fees from the old card, like it never cancelled.

I thought the Anthropic chat agent implementation was actually quite good at redirecting me to a human.

Fortunately some other HN readers are currently working on a browser extension to get a local LLM to argue with the enterprise LLM until it gives you your money back.

> might be a better link

It's definitely a much better link.

It actually describes what the ftc did wrong and even links to the decision. The guardian link doesn't do either, and so doesn't actually provide for meaningful discussion.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504694

These kinds of swipes are lame. They play to tired stereotypes that live in the minds of some but for everyone else they just make threads a bit more miserable.

The guidelines ask us to avoid comments like this:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504699.

We moved the comments to the submission with this URL, thanks!

I admit i half-read this second link, but the essential nuance it adds is that the ruling process didn't allow the violators (see: companies making it extremely hard to come out of a subscription) to do their homework in order to drill holes into this regulation that would have stopped their immoral buisness practices.

I understand there is a "by the book" process that should be respected, but this seems very fishy to me. I am certain the regulation would have passed had the tables been turned (meaning the companies would benefit from that said regulation)

Proton mail has an auto unsubscribe button to unsubscribe from any mailing list.

No more searching the very tiny tiny small print at the bottom of the email to unsubscribe.

you were sure you ticked or was you supposed to untick that scam tick box when you signed up or bought something online,

https://proton.me/support/auto-unsubscribe

Sometimes the unsubscribe method is used to confirm an actual person.

Then the email address gets noted and shipped off to others for further email / spam / phishing / etc.