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586 points gausswho | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.478s | source
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John23832 ◴[] 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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hiAndrewQuinn ◴[] No.44510095[source]
The standard capitalist response would be, it serves the consumer of a service who wouldn't be willing to pay more for the additional guarantee of click-to-cancel.

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.

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GolfPopper ◴[] No.44511072[source]
What's described here is really just legalized thievery with extra steps. "We make it difficult to stop paying us" versus "we charge extra for the privilege of not making it difficult to stop paying us" is just fraud versus extortion. That one or both may be technically legal is no excuse.
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hiAndrewQuinn ◴[] No.44511929[source]
It's not legalized thievery to make it nonfree to exit a contract you voluntarily signed up for in the first place. That's ridiculous and hyperbolic.

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.

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1. GolfPopper ◴[] No.44512760[source]
A contract requires a 'meeting of the minds'. Artificially inflating the practicalities of canceling (exiting the contract in accordance with the contract) so as to extract more money from one party fails that test.

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.

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2. hiAndrewQuinn ◴[] No.44513733[source]
Of course this is about cancellation fees. There are so many companies which specialize in hiring leopard tamers to go down into those very basements, photocopy those very forms, and sell them at the front door for a nominal fee. They're like 20% of all my YouTube ads.

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.