US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

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.

$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.

>$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