Whistleblowers are almost always revealing information that they are legally prevented from revealing, otherwise you wouldn’t need a whistleblower. A simple FOIA request would suffice.
> But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said. Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule," the judges' panel said.
It says it in the article
1. Not pegged at inflation, so the threshold is continually moving downward. 2. All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies to blow out the threshold. If you take the companies at their word, then you will never get under this threshold. Why trust them?
There are good reasons for it working this way, BTW. The needs of a company with hundreds or thousands of people are different than the needs of hobbyists and early-stage startups.
1. A user experience designer analyzes the user flow and decides where to put the cancellation button. They make decision about style, layout, and wording. This isn’t a ton of work, but something so critical to the company’s business and retention numbers will probably involve a lot of review, discussion, and bike shedding. This could easily take 24 people-hours of work on its own.
2. Somebody programs the front-end change. They probably have to put it behind a feature flag so it’s not visible until the back end is ready.
3. Somebody programs the back-end. They think about security, authentication, authorization, CSRF. That’s probably handled, but again, this is a critical feature and deserves extra care.
4. Somebody programs the interface to the company’s internal systems. They’re usually kind of a pain to work with. Billing, marketing, support, customer success. Something probably sends an email to the user. Maybe there’s a follow up flow to try to get them back with a special offer a month later. Etc.
5. The change is tested. Preferably with automated tests, but a feature like this has tendrils into systems throughout the company, and a lot of moving parts, so manual testing is also important. If it goes wrong, it’s a big deal, involving the potential for chargebacks and lawsuits, both of which are expensive at scale.
Throughout all this, you’re dealing with legacy code, because billing is one of the oldest systems the company has, and the one with the most risk of change, so the code is nasty and doesn’t follow current conventions. Every change is painful and tedious.
It’s alien to you that this could take more than 24 hours? At any company of size, I have trouble imagining it taking less.
ANY software change in a non-hobby business goes through a change process.
One as significant as an entirely new account cancelation flow requires extensive planning, design and testing.
What if you have equipment like a set top box? What if a shipping label needs to be mailed out? What if there are state-by-state regulations that must be complied with? What if you have to issue prorated returns of prepaid subscription fees? What if different accounts have different cancelation terms because of bulk pricing? And a million other things that you have to think about, design for and test.
Of course you can solve all this. But it's certainly not "BS" that it'll take more than 24 hours.
The FTC knew this. They cheated their process to ram through a rule. But you like the rule they tried to cheat to implement, so it's ok then, I guess.
A more extreme example would be the US Clean Air Act and how the EPA extended the rules to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Obviously going to cost a lot of money, but a necessary change to dodge climate disaster. That rule had to wait for Congress to pass the Inflation Reduction Act to become legal. Hopefully this minor consumer protection rule will be supported by Congress as well.
I don't know that the backend is necessarily needed. If the button only opened a support ticket/sent an email then the rest can be done by the employees who already processed cancellations on the phone. They just don't need to be on the phone with the customer to do it.
> Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule,"
but also, not the kind of subscription the article is about.
> But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed $100 million.
> The FTC had argued that it was not required to prepare the preliminary analysis because its initial estimate of the rule’s impact on the national economy was under the $100 million threshold — even though ultimately the presiding officer determined the impact exceeded the threshold.
This is a case where congress really did pass a concrete law, and the court is requiring the FTC to follow it. Sucks that a reasonable rule is getting voided for the sloppiness but I really don't think the courts are indefensibly out of line.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5390731-appeals-court-...
Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?
I interpret this as being the incoming FTC wanted to kill this but not withdrawal (due to bad optics).
They wanted to lose the case and did so by changing a judgment they controlled so that the rule could fail a legal procedural challenge.
Basically the FTC is required to go through a lengthy (probably multi-year) impact analysis if they determine that the rule will cause more than $100 million in impact to the US economy.
The previous administration determined that this rule would not meet the threshold, allowing quick implementation. The current administration then said "actually we think this would meet the threshold" giving the court an excuse to strike the rule down.
If the trump administration is correct that trapping people in gotya-contracts by making it difficult to cancel really constitutes $100 million of economic activity in the US, I think that says that there's something truly rotten about the basis of our economy.
Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and that will probably be sufficient.
Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.
I understand the idea behind the threshold for changing rules but this still feels very broken. There is a constant struggle of having to do everything perfectly to make any positive progress, but bad actors can operate however they like with seemingly little repercussions.
This is exactly the sort of situation where just following all the rules and procedures is fine and it doesn't, within a pretty broad range of outcomes, who gets final say.
They do consider themselves anti-regulation and anti-government in general, but they are not (mostly) anarchists, they do agree with some regulation and government, they just want the minimum possible and thus place a high bar on how bad the alternatives must be before they will agree to regulation/government.
By putting process in place for rules we give us time to notice bad rule proposals and give us a process to stop them.
Just off the top of my head, you could have a rule that if some business activity is estimated to cost consumers $100 million or more, then FTC can implement it instead of looking at the cost to companies. The “average US household” spends $200 a year on forgotten or unused subscriptions [1], if even 10% of those are due to a lack of click to cancel, that is $2.6 billion per year.
[1] https://thedesk.net/2025/05/cnet-subscription-survey-2025/
I can't speak to hypotheticals with certainty, but a straightforward reading of this law is that it would have exactly the same regulatory process requirements as the requirement to remove them.
How much time do you think an intern would need to render a button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already implemented function in the code base. Especially with trillions poured into the AI?
This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of idiots know it
The industry just doesn’t want to play fair.
The cost of allowing people to cancel subscriptions is more than the cost to implement a button.
The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.
And on international scale, because more competitive companies presumably out-compete foreign competitors.
So, FTC needs some permission and review to make national economy money?
Issuing an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) and conducting a regulatory analysis for certain rules are examples of such limits. The FTC did not follow the second (as was required) in this case.
Whether I happen to agree with the change they enacted (I do) doesn’t change the fact that I want my government agencies to follow the rules laid out for them. Because as surely as the sun rises in the east, sooner or later they’ll propose a rule I don’t agree with and I want there to be a lawful process and framework in place then, and therefore also now.
That's an insufficiently nuanced view of how competition works. Imagine two companies offering otherwise identical services, at identical price points, except that one company starts to offer click to cancel and the other does not. What happens next?
It's possible the other company implements it too. But it's also possible the other company lowers its prices, trading profit margin for trade stickiness. Enforcing click to cancel wouldn't give the other company the option to respond in the way it sees best.
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel then your product needs to be improved.
Almost like they can do it without the phone or something.
I will buy my next season pass when I have a history of entry transactions that proves I could have saved by buying one...
The more expensive gyms are not this way. They will let you cancel easily. They will often out of good customer service pause your membership if you don't visit at all for a month. However they cost twice as much and often have worn out equipment that a much cheaper gym would have replaced. As such if you really visit a gym one that makes canceling is hard.
Subscribing to a services isn't a vow of "until death do us part" and I don't want businesses trying to act like it is or make it so.
It makes me much more willing to trial a subscription service because I know I won't have to spend an hour of my life on the phone with a lovely Filipino man to stop that service.
The killer app for me on iPhone? Files. I literally switched from iPhone 3 to android because it didn’t have a file manager! Thankfully I came back.
It is one reason that with this switch allowing apps to send me outside of Apple's Ecosystem to subscribe, I hope that developers realize that if they make this the only option there are likely many people like myself that just won't subscribe to your app. I am far more likely to try a subscription that costs a couple dollars a month if it is through the app store instead of through some random website.
The game is rigged and enough deluded people think they can "game" it as well.
If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be switching immediately.
Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum, especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.
(Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)
So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund me, but then the company would charge me again for the subscription
This went on for several months. At some point the card expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription to my new card, even though I couldn’t even access my account
It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember how I finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see the charges “jump” through different cards. Especially given that usually any service that I don’t want cancelled, gets immediately cancelled if my card on file expires
When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.
that's happen more often than you think
also financial illiterate is real
Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.
I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.
> I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into
You are a minority in a minority that tracks at all! ;)
It's extremely easy to give people what they want: a quick way to cancel a subscription. It should be criminal to deliberately hide that action behind phone calls etc.
The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.
If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.
Let them. I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.
One reason is that the negative impact on your credit may end up costing you thousands and thousands of dollars if you e.g. need to get a mortgage
I used to religiously use things like ynab, but now I need to find ways to export my amazon transactions, google play, etc. It's nearly impossible, and it makes me feel completely out of control.
This is _not_ the same as using the Apple credit card for a subscription.
I recently had to cut down on expenses starting with extraneous subscriptions and charitable donations, of which I had dozens. Many ad a click-to-cancel or at least fill-out-a-form-to-cancel process, but some of them said 'call us'. Then I discovered that I could cut them all off from my side!
I got a few 'hey your donation stopped' messages, and answered the first ones, but they all eventually went away.
You may still be responsible for the payment, and may need to pay collection fees as well at that point.
However, many years ago, after an hour on hold failing to cancel Virgin ADSL I just cancelled the direct debit instead. They put a debt recovery firm on me! The direct debit was charged at the start of each billing period so it wasn't a non payment thing. I recall there used to be more indefensible "notice periods" for cancellation which were just pure scummy ways to force feed unwanted services but I don't think this had one.
What is necessary is regulatory (or statutory) enforcement of easy, online notice of cancellation, without a company able to frustrate you giving them (and them recording and acknowledging) that notice.
After its own ALJ found the rule’s effect would exceed $100 million annually, the FTC was obligated to publish an analysis of the “projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other effects” and the effectiveness of alternatives, as required by § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
It allows you to make virtual cards that are single use.
So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will automatically decline.
Until the powers that be gets its act together and stops allowing businesses to run all over us...this is the way.
I learned this the hard way with the New York Times doing this, but merchants can “force settle” a transaction if they want and it’ll override the decline they get. This is a violation of the merchant agreement but companies do it anyway (like NYT did to me). Privacy isn’t as bullet-proof as you would think.
Honestly this seems like a pretty obvious core banking feature nowadays, I'm surprised it's not more widespread (even in the US - reliable cancellation features across all recurring card payments would surely make people more comfortable with subscriptions). Under the hood all banks (AFAIK) are handle recurring payments by issuing an authorization token at first purchase, and validating it on later transactions. Allowing customers to see the list of active tokens that were recently used and then revoke them explicitly seems like a no brainer.
That line of cyber security mumbo jumbo does not inspire confidence
You have to actually resolve the issue with the company charging you, and do a chargeback if necessary which requires submitting evidence. It sucks, but virtual numbers don't make your bills go away.
Bush 41: 2
Bush 43: 6
Obama: 1
Trump: 4
oh
Wikipedia lists 4 Congress members that have died in office of "unspecified natural causes" since 2022. Aka they literally died of old age while in office.
I don't think they know what Signal, e-mail, or credit cards are.
It's hard because businesses don't want cancellation to be easy, as they lose money. A lot of people forget to cancel or just can't be bothered for a long time, especially if cancellation is hard.
And yes, it's as predatory as it sounds.
It's basically the financialization of business, as some point one of the few ways towards "growth" is nickel-and-diming everyone you can.
They refused to refund me and after I thought I'd cancelled and I had to run a charge back from my bank.
This is nefarious behaviour on their part and consumers need to be protected from it.
“You can cancel your subscription at any time by clicking the "cancel" button on your subscription settings page, here.“
It leads to a 404. With the benefit of the doubt, I’m not logged in — but it shouldn’t lead to a 404.
wtf are ppl downvoting this. i had it happen to me.
Corporate Republicans hate red tape and regulation for business but love it for starngling government and the poor (they just added huge onoreous red tape to medicaid and food stamp recipients because they absolutely hate their fellow americans).
Most European countries, have their own version of consumer protection agencies, usually any kind of complaint gets sorted out, even if takes a couple months.
If they fail for whatever reason, there is still the top European one.
Most of the time I read about FTC, it appears to side with the wrong guys.
The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.
It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
to consider your examples specifically, Musk and Brin were both immigrants to the US, and musk specifically did exactly the type of visa shenanigans that now is landing people in El Salvador
Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped their independence. The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were forced to by circumstance of their own making.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
But don't forget at the same time where China was during the end of the British power, nor Chinese revolutions, nor the state control over the Chinese populace.
Although the US vastly overweights what we think non-US-democracies would do (think Middle East and our meddling there) given the chance for US like freedom, I do not think we're seeing China in the natural so to speak. HK, for example, was not pleased with the "two systems one country" rule the CPP landed on.
Add in the fact that trade can no longer be assumed to be Chinese central, and China is slowly getting dragged into wars through Russia, and China still hasn't tried its mettle with Taiwan. A post invasion China will hit different. It's got internal issues of employment, real estate, have v. have nots ... it's got its hand full.
My guess is that China, like the US is seeing now on stretches, will be the master of its own demise. In the US a major contributing factor to Trump is the fact the US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich. That power vacuum has been filled by the Executive branch under Trump. There's more to it of course, but this two-part crisis is an important matter to keep in mind.
China takes its state craft more seriously in some sense, but that seriousness may get it into trouble. And in fact, several articles in the Economist have argued that if China wants to keep 5%+ YOY GDP growth, the CCP will have to take a back seat which is the one thing it will not do. CCP political power is foremost; good economy is damn nice to have to when you can get it -- and the CCP will go after it hard -- but there are limits ...
This and Citizens United.
But besides, with the rightward, populist/religious nut tilt of the US and corporations being able to bribe the President to get what they want without repercussions (Disney, Paramount, Meta, X, etc), I don’t see how the US is much better. All of the branches of government are giving power to the President that should be theirs.
Equilibriums in geopolitics are inherently unstable, states naturally compete for their own self-interest. No state will be willingly co-equal with another unless some actor with greater power forces it into that position.
To your last point, given the state of the US, it would probably be better for the world if the EU were on top at the moment. But they will not be.
The US has given me all sorts of opportunities I wouldn’t have anywhere else in the world as a native born citizens. I plan to extract as much as I can from it and keep my eyes open to retiring somewhere else.
I continuously vote and advocate for policies like universal healthcare, pre-K education, etc. But what are you going to do when voters vote for politicians thst ars against their own interests - getting rid of FEMA when the states that need it the most are Republican, Medicaid, etc.
This isn’t a pie in the sky shrill “I’m leaving the US tomorrow”. But my wife and I already did the digital nomad thing domestically for a year starting in late 2022 and going forward starting next year, we are going to be spending more time out of the country in US time zones while I work remotely starting with Costa Rica.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.
Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.
Everyone agreed with the spirit of the rule, even the two republican appointees who voted against it.
They voted against it because the FTC cheated and broke their own rule making process, they believed it would be struck down by the courts because of this.
They were right. The courts sympathized with the rule, but held that the FTC cheated it's process, and that if left unchecked it could create a tyrannical FTC issuing rules at their whim, ignoring the true economic impact of their rule.
All this court ruling said is that the FTC needs to follow the law and their own defined process for rule making.
They are free to implement this rule, they just need to do it the right way.
While we may not be happy with the short term effect, this was a good ruling. The FTC will go back and do this properly, and hopefully next time will follow the law when making rules.
The problem is US congress has not functioned for 2 decades. They no longer pass actual laws. This means the FTC is stuck reinterpreting their existing powers to try and squeeze out regulation that they can but that's it.
Right; there was. We’d refer to that as the “enabling act” by which Congress delegates regulatory lawmaking authority to the FTC.
> The FTC isn’t supposed to create laws
You have deeply misunderstood US federal regulatory law.
> Or FTC can sue based on existing law
Yes; that’s the idea. Regulations are law.
The real question is why isn't congress doing their job? They control both the existence and funding of the FTC and additionally the laws the FTC are tasked with interpreting and enforcing. If congress is unfit for purpose they should be replaced.
So maybe the American way of doing things can also work if a healthy competitive environment is preserved.
The problem lately is that American companies have become monopolies and the formula firms extracting profits or stock hikes for the shareholders dictate that they screw the user up until barely legal territory.
So maybe America can roll without consumer protection laws and agencies if they can fix the business environment.
They just need to find a way out of enshittification, a process US companies perfected.
this does not track with my experience
I will give you 2 for the opposite: Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the time. Much higher bar than European regulators require.
I'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large expensive items.
You’re creating an absurd standard “repeatedly return large expensive items” but even every day things are way easier in the US.
On average US companies are much better with customer experience. Of course until they corner you, then they may choose not to and then you have it worse than Europeans.
From my point of view processing a return costs the store money. If they don't make a high margin they will (try to) discourage it. If in US everywhere they are fine with it for me it means they make higher margins everywhere.
Sounds like a win-win then.
This isn't zero sum. Just because it's better for the company doesn't mean it's worse for the consumer.
Ordering on French consumer shops I got exactly what I asked for, at a reasonable price in a reasonable time.
Product descriptions are actually helpful and there is little risk to get some fake product instead.
Amazon's customer support was incredibly helpful, but that's not what I want to pay for.
FWIW, I moved to AliExpress for the stuff I'm ok to gamble with.
Xfinity comes to mind. The last time I bought a new modem, I had to basically yell 'cancel my account' over and over again until I finally got to speak to a living, breathing human, who could provision the modem for me.
I would say things like cable and internet companies, as well as airlines. They are similarly frustrating in Europe but not to the extent that they are in the US and the difference comes down to better regulation.
For that matter I would say the tech regulation environment probably benefits European consumers with stronger data privacy rights, and a 14-day right to withdraw from digital contracts.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information about the EU from, but I can return any item I order online within 14 days, and then I have another 14 days to send it back, no questions asked, no need to give any reason. Some companies even offer 30 to 90 days, but the 14 + 14 days is the legal minimum.
Europe is very far from being a single entity. Yet, SMS/RCS is popular enough, and in many countries WhatsApp is non-existent.
It's not even a practice limited to "shady" companies, the New York Times would let you sign up online, but only cancel via a convoluted phone call with one of their subscription retainment reps.
These days you're better off obtaining a credit card which lets you instantly block transactions. These companies with their b/s unsubscribe gauntlets aren't worth your time.
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.
Now, the rule is good. There is no reason why the current FTC shouldn't implement it. It literally harms nobody except for businesses addicted to dark patterns.
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.
Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.
The other issue is that if these things are guaranteed in law, they have a nasty habit of simply disappearing. A great example of that is ads in paid streaming services. In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content. They are even toying with not allowing a higher payment to opt out of ads (which will likely come).
Click to cancel would be the same way. You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option. Just like nothing has stopped companies from requiring phone calls, at the right time, in the right manor, and with a 20 step Q/A retention process. Bad enough that you can now pay people to sit through retention processes to cancel for you.
We can get pretty close. Take Adobe versus Affinity. Same industry, very similar product suites, but totally different pricing strategies, and Adobe makes cancellation much more annoying.
There are plenty of examples of this if you keep your eyes open. I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't have an exact example to give you is because I'm under NDA and I don't watch most consumer retail enough to know.
>Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.
Tacit collusion becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain in any market with more than a handful of players. A different pricing strategy is one of the easiest ways to counterposition against an incumbent there is. It's part of how SaaS toppled bubble wrap CDs in the first place.
That can be lower pricing with the same model, or it can be a one time purchase versus a subscription, or it can be a hard to cancel but very cheap subscription over a very expensive one time purchase.
> In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content.
People are more willing to pay $10 per month with ads than $12 per month without ads. I don't find that especially shocking. The market figures out what people actually want, not what people say they want.
Say it were not so. Then we would see some Netflix renegades start a new streaming platform that is Ad Free Again™ and only a tiny bit more expensive than the competitors, and most consumers would switch. It's not impossible, but I haven't seen that happen yet.
>You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option.
If I care enough about the feature and this price differential, I'll notice this and eventually go through the aggravation of cancelling to switch to a new, slightly higher priced service which does have click to cancel. I paid more for the easy cancellation promise and when it was revoked the service became less valuable to me. Whatever, it was fun while it lasted. A monthly subscription to Netflix is not a marriage, and it is not an investment.
We hand out these get-out-of-trouble cards to the type of useless trash that destroy lives (see pollution, workplace safety, dangerous products knowingly misadvertised as healthy, etc), let those disgusting shareholders profit, and then use tax dollars to cover the bill (if anyone does). Now you wan them to have rights on top of the special treatment? How about instead we do something that is sane, something that doesn't make a handful of people extremely powerful, and doesn't make millions of sad, pathetic tools who just want to pretend they matter complicit? How about we say, "Look if you want special protection, you have to follow these rules that limit the damage you do. If you want to do those damaging actions, you can be responsible", and put in a bunch of rules that stop these specially protected investors from profiting off other's suffering.
tl;dr - it's an incredibly stupid and ultimately harmful position that a paper granting special privileges has rights. Corporations are no more entitled to profit than anyone else, privileges should come with responsiblities equal to them.
this is Bad, Actually
The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.
HN guidelines ask that you say "The article mentions that".[0]
A shoddy implementation would just mean later problems. Hopefully the FTC gets the memo and does it "the right way" to make it watertight, otherwise people will just get away with doing whatever they want.
The reason they have to do studies is so they can't rush things through. We don't want them to be able to rush things through. They're creating law.
Either way this ruling was bought and paid for.
Really though, our banks should be the ones fixing this problem. Do they not work for us? We're more like fee cattle than we are customers. It should be simple to cancel through the bank itself, disallowing further payments. In fact though, the opposite happens. Once one of these vampire scams gets your card number, they can put through payments that you have disallowed and the bank will side with them rather than you. Had an incident with a cell phone company a few years back and the bank decided that they had more say over my money than I did. None of this can be or will be fixed, because you're all distracted by the news media telling you that the evil courts have cheated the heroic FTC bureaucracy, and that you need to vote for the other team to restore balance to the force.
If purchasing a service requires your account/routing number, or the card number + cvs code, you really just need to go without.
FTC is better off staying away from regulations and instead making a vague rule prohibiting companies from complicated cancellation processes if they are to be charging recurring fees. The “complicated process” would be subjective but enough to encourage companies to avoid setting up a cancellation process (bypassing the expensive burden rule) and maybe the company then chooses a simpler cancellation option.
CapitalOne allows unlimited virtual cards and IT IS AWESOME because you can sidestep PayPal.
Man, do Trump supporters actually get excited about awful things like this? I don't get it.
It is trivially easy to capture the intent to cancel and allow customers to execute in one click. Any business that does otherwise is actively expending energy to prey upon economic surplus and add to deadweight loss.
(unfortunately, this seems necessary here on HN)
>"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.
I don't get that. From what I understand the justification is that the economic effect is greater than the $100M bar. But what does the 23h of professional services has to do with anything there? Is the $100M impact judged only on cost of implementation?
cebert•17h ago