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US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

(arstechnica.com)
574 points gausswho | 5 comments | 08 Jul 25 22:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.623s | source
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ApolloFortyNine ◴[09 Jul 25 15:53 UTC] No.44511593[source]▶
From the article

>"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission's rulemaking process are fatal here,"

As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what sounds good.

>The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a $100 million effect.

Basically the judges, and a lower court, all agreed that there's no way this rule won't have at last a $100 million in impact, and when something has that much impact there are rules they were meant to follow and didn't. And they rightly commented that if this was allowed to stand, the FTC and every government agency would just always estimate low in these cases.

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Glyptodon ◴[09 Jul 25 17:35 UTC] No.44512776[source]▶
$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US.

But it also seems ridiculous to skip since four people doing nothing but having a discussion about a new rule for 30 minutes across a good portion of those businesses is easily $100mil w/o them even having to lift a pinky besides.

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1. slg ◴[09 Jul 25 17:49 UTC] No.44512915[source]▶
>$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US.

A minute of internet research suggests that specific $100m figure is from a 45-year-old law[1]. I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. That equivalent value today is almost $400m.

EDIT: Actually the number might come from a 29-year-old amendment[2]. It is disappointing how hard it is to track these things down.

[1] - https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/rulemaking/flexibil...

[2] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/942

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2. ct0 ◴[09 Jul 25 18:09 UTC] No.44513142[source]▶
Seems that the hard coded fixed dollar amount argument can apply everywhere, see small claims court maximums.
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3. arwhatever ◴[09 Jul 25 18:17 UTC] No.44513210[source]▶
Not to mention > $10K financial transaction disclosures
4. jMyles ◴[10 Jul 25 02:51 UTC] No.44516732[source]▶
> I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation.

It's an utter mess. This job falls primarily to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who compiles the basket of goods that make up the Consumer Price Index - but this doesn't include food or fuel, for example.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis also maintains several indices which are used as inflation proxies when it's convenient (and which are most often used by the various working groups within the federal reserve system to, eg, determine interest rates). But these are somewhat more volatile and more subject to fluctuations due to international political affairs, etc.

The most obvious metric - the literal inflation in the money supply - is also tricky because the process by which money is created is so baroque.

The ability to have more coherent laws which reference amounts of money is a good reason to adopt sounder and more transparent practices in monetary policy.

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5. slg ◴[10 Jul 25 04:45 UTC] No.44517276[source]▶
I don't understand the point in raising these specific practical objections like my simple comment was intended to be the text of the legislation. There are all sorts of ways these issues can be addressed like pegging it to a specific index of inflation and have it run on a long delay to allow full transparency and predictability.