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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.
HN guidelines ask that you say "The article mentions that".[0]
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.
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.
This is just an obvious lie.
They're not supposed to, but they obviously do. Usually against common citizens' interest.
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 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.
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.
[0] https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024
[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
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.
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.
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…
Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.
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.
Intuitively it feels like their wealth would eclipse Elon Musk.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
I have an extreme textualist view of constitutional limits on legislative 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?
I wouldn’t say “literally.” I would say it’s a fair reading, as one would apply to a commercial contract.
>,(In other words, for state governments, anything not prohibited is allowed?)
Yes, state governments are not ones of enumerated powers. They inherited the plenary legislative power of the British parliament and can do whatever they want that’s not expressly prohibited.
> 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?
I think it’s unsound. My secret left wing view is I think New York can regulate guns (but also Utah can make a state church).
> 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?
It’s a figure of speech that is especially revealing of the “underlying concept,” which is discovering constitutional principles in moral or political philosophy. I basically don’t think that’s legitimate. The constitution embodies a particular set of moral and political philosophies. Sometimes we add more (e.g. the concept of equal protection). But judges don’t get to be philosophers weighing in on moral issues the framers of the constitution and amendments clearly didn’t contemplate.