US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

Depends on how accurate you think the >$100 million estimated impact from the lower court is. When the FTC did the analysis they came up with a lower impact so they didn't have to do it. I'd be more willing to believe they got it right than a single judge did.

Why do you think the FTC analysis was more accurate than the opposing sides? The judges, of whom there were multiple, were going off of opposing side argumentation not just their own subjective opinion. That's how courts in the US work.

More important than the Heritage Foundation is the Federalist Society in the case of getting more conservative judges.

Can you point to specific examples where the courts interpretation and reasoning wasn't rooted in the law and the arguments from the lawyers in the court specificall? Because I can't. I might disagree with some of the opinions but I can't point to anything where they were clearly not basing it on the law and the various lawyer's argumentation.

Good catch. That whole pipeline is very robust too - I remember mocking the Burke society folks in college, not realizing at all that they were figuring out who was headed to work with federal judges/think tanks for the next generation.

Why would this have any economic impact? These dark patterns don't generate any net value, they just move money from one pocket to another. The money will be spent somewhere else, instead.

That request is a trap and can’t be satisfied. Any answer can be hand waved away with ease. It’s vague yet restrictive.

If that request is a trap then you have basically made my point for me I guess.

If you believe the judges are all being as objective as possible and that the systemic flaws in our judicial system are not being exploited by the Trump admin/lawyers representing the Trump admin without pushback from said judges than you can’t be convinced by me. I can cite an example, and if you aren’t personally convinced you can simply say “the court of law said x was innocent or y was held liable” or whatever you consider the correct arbiter.

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 economic impact here is only factoring in how much it would cost companies to comply with the measure which is inherently designed to give an extra hurdle by not counting the money saved by consumers not trapped by dark cancellation patterns.

Is your entire position that government doesn't work so we should get rid of it? Or do you have proposals for actual ways to improve it?

The companies suing to stop this have every reason to massively inflate the difficulty and cost of compliance to continue their long established dark patterns of trapping people in difficult to cancel subscriptions. Judges are not experts in the field and have a hard time evaluating the actual credibility of various presented estimates, you see it all the time with long debunked forensic evidence techniques being accepted still years later by judges and courts.

Compliance and enforcement costs

To figure out who's right, we would need to do research, rather than choosing the judges versus the FTC based on vibes.

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.

The main reason I think the court got it right is that with ~33 million businesses in the US you could argue that sending every business an email would cost them >$100 mil in just labor cost if they forward it a few times and several employees spend a reasonable amount of time reading it.

Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who do?

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.

Why does it matter? As far as I can tell () the law asks the FTC to do an estimate, they did, and now the argument was ‘some one else thinks it’s wrong’. But does the law require an actual estimate?

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…

No, that is not my position. I don’t know where you got that from. My position is advocating for healthy, much-deserved skepticism of the current judicial system. More specifically, I am saying that an appeal to some alleged neutrality/objectivity judges are supposed to maintain when carrying out their duty is particularly flimsy in 2025.

I don't know how you advocate for such a thing without holding judges to a standard of neutrality and objectivity and acknowledging/celebrating it when it happens.

> Luckily not all 33M of those businesses are wringing subscriptions out of their customers (yet), so it might be fairer if we could narrow it down to the subset who do?

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.

Right. It doesn’t count the money consumers save by not being trapped primarily because most businesses are legitimate. This threshold is all about identifying rules that are costly for legitimate businesses to implement and allowing them time to suggest alternative rules. If the alternative rules would be just as effective while being cheaper to implement, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules in favor of the cheaper alternatives.

I don’t understand what you’re saying anymore. It sounds like you’re agreeing with me? If we have to celebrate when it happens, then that means it’s not a standard expectation. It’s special and worthy of celebration.

Moving money from one pocket to another... is economic activity.

The FTC did their estimate, it came out to less than $100 million so they, to their estimation were not required to take the additional steps of some types of impact analysis and the required comment period etc about it, the courts are disagreeing with the FTC and kicking the rule out. They only have to do that extra step when the economic impact would exceed $100m USD.