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US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

(arstechnica.com)
574 points gausswho | 2 comments | 08 Jul 25 22:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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John23832 ◴[09 Jul 25 13:14 UTC] No.44509670[source]▶
What consumer does this serve at all? What citizen does this serve at all?

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.

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caesil ◴[09 Jul 25 14:59 UTC] No.44510834[source]▶
If you actually bother to click through and read the article, you'd find the court expressed sympathies with the intent of the rule, but the FTC "is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more", and they did not do that.

The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.

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rtkwe ◴[09 Jul 25 15:39 UTC] No.44511415[source]▶
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.
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zaphar ◴[09 Jul 25 16:04 UTC] No.44511710[source]▶
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.
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1. rtkwe ◴[09 Jul 25 17:05 UTC] No.44512420[source]▶
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.
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2. skybrian ◴[09 Jul 25 17:22 UTC] No.44512642[source]▶
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.