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