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Tree Borrows

https://plf.inf.ethz.ch/research/pldi25-tree-borrows.html
103•zdw•1h ago•9 comments

Why LLMs Can't Write Q/Kdb+: Writing Code Right-to-Left

https://medium.com/@gabiteodoru/why-llms-cant-write-q-kdb-writing-code-right-to-left-ea6df68af443
104•gabiteodoru•1d ago•59 comments

Ruby 3.4 frozen string literals: What Rails developers need to know

https://www.prateekcodes.dev/ruby-34-frozen-string-literals-rails-upgrade-guide/
136•thomas_witt•3d ago•62 comments

A fast 3D collision detection algorithm

https://cairno.substack.com/p/improvements-to-the-separating-axis
53•OlympicMarmoto•2h ago•2 comments

Is the doc bot docs, or not?

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/what-are-we-even-doing-here/
138•tobr•8h ago•69 comments

Helm local code execution via a malicious chart

https://github.com/helm/helm/security/advisories/GHSA-557j-xg8c-q2mm
135•irke882•10h ago•65 comments

Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful

https://florian-kraemer.net//software-architecture/2025/07/07/Most-RESTful-APIs-are-not-really-RESTful.html
180•BerislavLopac•9h ago•283 comments

X Chief Says She Is Leaving the Social Media Platform

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/technology/linda-yaccarino-x-steps-down.html
126•donohoe•1h ago•118 comments

US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/us-court-cancels-ftc-rule-that-would-have-made-canceling-subscriptions-easier/
347•gausswho•17h ago•328 comments

Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

https://projectionlab.com/blog/we-reached-1m-arr-with-zero-funding
665•jonkuipers•1d ago•168 comments

Galiliean-invariant cosmological hydrodynamical simulations on a moving mesh

https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~volker/arepo/
5•gone35•2d ago•1 comments

Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?

https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2025/04/04/etymology-of-call/
158•todsacerdoti•12h ago•107 comments

7-Zip for Windows can now use more than 64 CPU threads for compression

https://www.7-zip.org/history.txt
170•doener•2d ago•119 comments

IKEA ditches Zigbee for Thread going all in on Matter smart homes

https://www.theverge.com/smart-home/701697/ikea-matter-thread-new-products-new-smart-home-strategy
232•thunderbong•6h ago•123 comments

Florida is letting companies make it harder for highly paid workers to swap jobs

https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-made-it-harder-highly-paid-workers-to-swap-jobs-2025-7
73•pseudolus•1h ago•72 comments

RapidRAW: A non-destructive and GPU-accelerated RAW image editor

https://github.com/CyberTimon/RapidRAW
209•l8rlump•13h ago•91 comments

Astro is a return to the fundamentals of the web

https://websmith.studio/blog/astro-is-a-developers-dream/
201•pumbaa•6h ago•172 comments

Breaking Git with a carriage return and cloning RCE

https://dgl.cx/2025/07/git-clone-submodule-cve-2025-48384
349•dgl•22h ago•140 comments

Using MPC for Anonymous and Private DNA Analysis

https://vishakh.blog/2025/07/08/using-mpc-for-anonymous-and-private-dna-analysis/
18•vishakh82•4h ago•7 comments

A Emoji Reverse Polish Notation Calculator Written in COBOL

https://github.com/ghuntley/cobol-emoji-rpn-calculator
9•ghuntley•3d ago•0 comments

Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the robotics industry

https://venturebeat.com/ai/hugging-face-just-launched-a-299-robot-that-could-disrupt-the-entire-robotics-industry/
100•fdaudens•1h ago•88 comments

Where can I see Hokusai's Great Wave today?

https://greatwavetoday.com/
106•colinprince•12h ago•81 comments

ESIM Security

https://security-explorations.com/esim-security.html
87•todsacerdoti•7h ago•41 comments

Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004

https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/
157•K7PJP•16h ago•21 comments

I'm Building LLM for Satellite Data EarthGPT.app

https://www.earthgpt.app/
87•sabman•2d ago•11 comments

Nvidia Becomes First Company to Reach $4T Market Cap

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/09/nvidia-4-trillion.html
20•mfiguiere•2h ago•6 comments

Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database

https://www.generalanalysis.com/blog/supabase-mcp-blog
783•rexpository•22h ago•421 comments

Smollm3: Smol, multilingual, long-context reasoner LLM

https://huggingface.co/blog/smollm3
345•kashifr•1d ago•70 comments

I Ported SAP to a 1976 CPU. It Wasn't That Slow

https://github.com/oisee/zvdb-z80/blob/master/ZVDB-Z80-ABAP.md
64•weinzierl•2d ago•40 comments

Jurisdiction Is Nearly Irrelevant to the Security of Encrypted Messaging Apps

https://soatok.blog/2025/07/09/jurisdiction-is-nearly-irrelevant-to-the-security-of-encrypted-messaging-apps/
5•zdw•2h ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/us-court-cancels-ftc-rule-that-would-have-made-canceling-subscriptions-easier/
345•gausswho•17h ago

Comments

cebert•17h ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504694
ars•13h ago
"after finding that the commission behind it failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process."
throw10920•12h ago
I hope the FTC tries to re-submit the rule while following procedure - click-to-cancel is really good for consumers... but not enough to justify trying to break laws to pass it.
dylan604•11h ago
You realize the current FTC is not the same FTC that did this? There’s no way this FTC does anything in favor of consumers
fwlr•13h ago
The FTC was warned at the time that they were flouting required procedures and that their rule would therefore not survive legal scrutiny. Lo and behold it did not.
dboreham•13h ago
Because systematic corruption presumably?
jibe•12h ago
If you are sniffing out corruption, aren’t the ones flouting required procedures likely the corrupt ones?
Aeolun•12h ago
Kinda, but corruption in my favor is unlikely to see me complain about it.
wrasee•6h ago
That’s obviously no justification, all corruption is in someone’s favour. Society functions by rules. Break those founding principles and you break everything.
wqaatwt•6h ago
What if the “required procedures” are held in place by corruption?
hshdhdhj4444•6h ago
Almost never.

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.

tbrownaw•11h ago
More that they mistakenly thought that doing the right thing meant they didn't have to do the thing right.
bjt12345•11h ago
But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do given that now it won't be done.
techpineapple•4h ago
Right, if they were screwing over customers, we’d call it disruption and give them a medal, if not $1 billion dollars. Since they’re trying to help people, we wag our fingers at them.
weberer•7h ago
>they were flouting required procedures
guelo•6h ago
who warned them?
Hnrobert42•5h ago
A then-commissioner who is now the head of the FTC.
guelo•5h ago
That commissioner also hated the fact that consumers were going to stop being robbed by big corps.
VonTum•2h ago
I find it unproductive to assign emotion to such blatant corruption. I'd rather frame it as "That comissioner sees it to be in his personal best interest to not stop consumers being robbed by big corps."
miltonlost•2h ago
Ah so a Trump appointee and 2 judges appointed by Trump. Now that's a group I would never trust to follow the law.
hshdhdhj4444•6h ago
Please point to an example of these warnings.
VWWHFSfQ•6h ago
> 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.

> 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

braiamp•5h ago
The fact that it takes more than 24 hours to put a 1 click cancel button is alien to me.
delfinom•5h ago
Well, after you factor in some of these companies are probably large corps with layers of middle management. It will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
fireflash38•4h ago
Which explains the issue with the law neatly:

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?

jdlshore•4h ago
You must not work on these sorts of systems. It can easily take more than 24 hours. In case you’re genuinely interested in learning more, here’s how it works.

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.

braiamp•3h ago
How many companies of "size" you know of? Because that process looks HORRIBLY inefficient and only primed to extract as much money of the consumer. You just need to put it in the account screen. A big red button. Your _workflow_ is there to make excuses. If the move was the other way, you would gladly pay the cost, but because it actually hurts your "business model" then it is suddenly a problem. No buddy, I call BS on all that, and call BS on the law itself.
claytongulick•3h ago
So, you're holding a strong opinion about something that you're completed uneducated about and have no experience with?

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.

jdlshore•2h ago
For the types of issues we’re discussing here, we’re talking about companies making more than $50mm yearly, which is about 75-100 employees. So successful small businesses and larger. I don’t have exact numbers, but this size business is very common. Most professional programmers will have seen the issues I’m talking about.
axus•3h ago
Of course now that the FTC rule is well known, anyone designing a new system would require click-to-cancel. The new burden is low, but at the time the big companies probably spent millions to fix it.

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.

lozenge•2h ago
We are assuming the calculation for the number of companies affected is correct. If they are using a provider like Shopify or a WordPress plugin, the cost will only be to upgrade the plugin.

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.

guelo•4h ago
Why are you pasting the article when it doesn't include any warnings that were given to the ftc at the time?
voxic11•3h ago
It literally says they were warned by the administrative judge that a preliminary regulatory analysis was required to make such a rule.

> 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,"

xedrac•13h ago
I always felt like those click to unsubscribe links were nothing more than a "please prove to us with certainty that this is an actively used account so we can set a sticky bit on it and sell that info for $$$"
orev•13h ago
That’s a commonly held idea for spam emails. This is about services you’ve signed up and pay for on a recurring basis, and was targeted at companies who make it very easy to open an account, but then require byzantine methods to cancel.
DANmode•12h ago
That is a valid paranoia,

but also, not the kind of subscription the article is about.

globalnode•6h ago
just mark them as spam, hurts them more and doesnt notify them of anything.
whycome•3h ago
It’s like browser popups that only give you the option of block or allow. I want neither! Block means I add that site to a permanent local list and I really need no record of it at all.
bpodgursky•13h ago
From a different article [1]:

> 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-...

jordanb•13h ago
From googling apparently the "presiding officer" is appointed by the FTC chair. So it sounds like the FTC spiked its own case.
bpodgursky•12h ago
It was Lina Khan. She just felt strongly about going out the way she came in — losing every single case.
fxtentacle•10h ago
Illumina, Tapestry, Kroger, Lockheed Martin would disagree.

Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?

jordanb•3h ago
There is a new FTC administration.

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.

bluGill•2h ago
It better fits the facts that the incoming FTC wants this, but they want to do the job right. At least some of the incoming FTC was in place when they rule was passed in the first place and their statements then say they wanted the rule but they wanted the correct procedures done so that it would stand up in court.
jordanb•46m ago
If they wanted to change how they implement the rule they could have withdrawn it rather than continue to an adverse judgement in court.

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.

fritzo•12h ago
The U.S. Court of Appeals has therefore quantified the severity of this issue.
renewiltord•12h ago
Typical decel nonsense to add all these preliminary analyses. This is CEQA/NEPA type garbage.

Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and that will probably be sufficient.

bpodgursky•12h ago
Normally I'm aligned but this is sort of a NEPA rule making sticking a monkeywrench in the gears creating new regulations, so I'm not totally opposed to the principle, as irritating as it is here.
renewiltord•12h ago
Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.

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.

MangoToupe•11h ago
A major unwritten rule of american society is that there is no bigger crime than economic friction to the shareholder... including statute itself.
skort•9h ago
It's interesting that businesses can build an obviously toxic subscription model that robs consumers of both money and time, but when asked to change it now we have to consider their costs.

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.

avhception•8h ago
While I share your frustration, I don't think we should lower the bar for positive progress. Because that's how one becomes a bad actor themselves.
immibis•6h ago
When bad actors have a low bar but good actors have a high bar, the country is bound to collapse. Look at how many rules the current regime is flouting. But the other side has to dot every i for some reason.
roenxi•5h ago
Are we still talking about click-to-cancel here? There aren't 'other sides' in any meaningful sense on this sort of administrative decision. There is a solid consensus that people shouldn't have to pay for subscriptions they don't want and a couple of broadly inconsequential points to debate on how to implement it.

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.

fireflash38•4h ago
The "other side" here is the political group that is consistently anti-regulation, anti-consumer, anti-government.
bluGill•3h ago
The "other side" does not consider themselves anti-consumer. You disagree with them on what anti-consumer means, but they have their own reasons to consider their position pro-consumer and you are doing debate a disservice by ignoring that.

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.

matthewdgreen•5h ago
I think we should absolutely lower this particular bar.
braiamp•5h ago
The bar should be where changes happen to move in the correct direction easily, while moving in the incorrect direction harder. If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens, because the "potential gains" of doing so would be enormous.
bluGill•3h ago
That is easy to say. However I don't think you can define "correct direction" in a useful way that also gets at what you mean. Every definition you can come up with someone will find a loop hole that fits the letter of your definition, while it is against what you mean.

By putting process in place for rules we give us time to notice bad rule proposals and give us a process to stop them.

542354234235•1h ago
Rules that give leeway to act when consumer costs are estimated to be above a certain threshold, instead of when company costs are below a certain threshold would be a much better, if still imperfect, rule that would satisfy the “correct direction in a useful way”.

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/

bpodgursky•1h ago
> If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens

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.

sameermanek•8h ago
Devil is in the details, they said each company would have to pay for less than 23 hrs to a low level engineer to avoid the $100 mil impact.

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

firesteelrain•8h ago
These “bench full of idiots” are not blind to the fact that there are deceptive practices regarding subscriptions. FTC didn’t do their job right unfortunately and here we are. Now, new administration and it’s doubtful this will get picked up again barring any law passed by Congress.
Dylan16807•6h ago
It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.
firesteelrain•3h ago
Sure, 23 hours on average is generous if the goal is honest implementation. But the issue isn’t the time. It is that companies don’t want this button to exist at all. They are not stalling because it's hard; they’re stalling because friction equals profit. That’s why you get weaponized complexity, endless “design reviews” and inflated estimates. The FTC did their job, sort of. They got “cancelled” (hehe) because of a bureaucratic hurdle.

The industry just doesn’t want to play fair.

jagged-chisel•6h ago
Your argument presumes that “cost” is “money spent to implement,” when in reality any reduction in predicted revenue is also a “cost.”

The cost of allowing people to cancel subscriptions is more than the cost to implement a button.

arzig•5h ago
There’s a non trivial chance this interacts with credit card processing. There is also app the legal liability of you tell someone meet are cancelled and continue charging them. So probably so not something you trust an intern to do.
fzeroracer•4h ago
This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.

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.

bluGill•2h ago
Just testing this should take more than 23 hours for non-trivial code. Ship it and pray it works is not a good plan when if the code doesn't work the government will be coming after you.
hamilyon2•6h ago
I am not getting it. The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster. And thus improve economic situation, not only in markets affected by rule, but also on all other markets, in case customer wants to take his money elsewhere.

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?

sokoloff•4h ago
The FTC was not given unlimited rule-making power by Congress, and has to live within the power granted to them.

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.

hiAndrewQuinn•1h ago
>The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster.

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.

highwayman47•13h ago
Severing contracts for me, not for thee.
standardUser•13h ago
The 8th circuit court of appeals is the most conservative, with only one judge appointed by a Democratic president.
dmix•12h ago
What about the earlier administrative judge who warned FTC they were ignoring established rules when it was reviewed the first time, then FTC proceeded to ignore that judge and passed it anyway, which resulted it in being in front of this appeals court?
bluGill•2h ago
In this case it quickly becomes clear that the court was right. The ends do not justify the means. Score one for conservatives for following/enforcing the law I guess.
thrance•2h ago
Weird how they only enforce the law when it serves their interests though.
bluGill•25m ago
That is false. The conservatives have made it clear that they support the rule, but it needs to be done right. The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the law?
HPsquared•12h ago
The time to unsubscribe is now!
dalemhurley•12h ago
Here is an idea, make your service value for money and people will not want to cancel.

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.

db48x•12h ago
That is a novel idea! But ironically it is not actually the issue that was in front of the court.
silisili•12h ago
You just offended siriusxm, every newspaper, and every gym in the country.
dylan604•12h ago
Office365. I only have it because it’s necessary for work not because I want to use the product.
delecti•11h ago
WaPo and NYT were both very easy to cancel.
ethagnawl•11h ago
WaPo was easy when I canceled last November. The lost time I canceled a NYT subscription, it still required a phone call.
buckle8017•10h ago
They say it requires a phone call but amazingly an email that's says you will charge back any future charge works too.

Almost like they can do it without the phone or something.

_carbyau_•9h ago
Don't forget swimming pool season pass.

I will buy my next season pass when I have a history of entry transactions that proves I could have saved by buying one...

sensanaty•6h ago
Man what the fuck is it with gyms? I'm not even in the US, but even in the Netherlands where these kind of things are generally super simple and hassle-free (by law) I've had some nightmarish, headache inducing situations with gyms. I've literally never encountered anything else, ever, nearly as bad as dealing with gyms and their contracts in my entire life. It was a million times easier closing brokerage accounts with decent chunks of money in them than it was to cancel a gym membership I once had.
bluGill•2h ago
Most gyms are over subscribed - if everyone who has a membership actually went to the gym they wouldn't have enough space/equipment for everyone. They would need to raise their rates to afford more. That is those who have a membership but don't go to the gym are subsidizing those who do go to the gym.

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.

unethical_ban•9h ago
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 business model should be illegal.
colechristensen•8h ago
Ok, but also, I just want to stop paying for things sometimes.

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.

MengerSponge•12h ago
My favorite underappreciated aspect of the iOS app store is its absolutely friction-free cancellation.

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.

Towaway69•12h ago
This. My iPhone is still a pleasure to use, everyday. But perhaps I can only appreciate this because I was an android user for years.

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.

politelemon•9h ago
It was the opposite journey for me. I never felt for once that it was my iPhone, perhaps because I was an android user for years.
oblio•8h ago
Apparently Google Play has the same cancellation mechanism.
arielcostas•8h ago
Google Play also has that if you subscribe through there (which might be more expensive because of the fee Google takes), plus an easier refund system if you subscribe to something and decide it's not worth paying it
nerdjon•7h ago
That and the reminder emails from Apple.

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.

xyst•12h ago
The USA is not a country for the people. It’s a country for the rich and powerful.

The game is rigged and enough deluded people think they can "game" it as well.

dylan604•11h ago
This was pretty well established by the constitution, only you left out white male from your rich and powerful. It took amendments to get past white and male.
boroboro4•5h ago
While it’s true US was quite good on equality amongst this particular group. What we have now is quite different from it.
arwhatever•9h ago
Our culture is an unfortunate nexus between strong contract enforcement and weak consumer protections.
tjpnz•8h ago
Sure it is. Corporations are people too and laws like these take away their freedoms!
postalrat•12h ago
I should be able to go into my bank or card service online. View a list of all my subscriptions. Click on a subscription (or select all). And cancel.

If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be switching immediately.

LiamPowell•11h ago
Simply move to Australia, all the major banks here offer this service: https://payto.com.au/

Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum, especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.

saulpw•11h ago
I use privacy.com for this.

(Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)

gblargg•11h ago
I wasn't able to jump through their hoops to sign up. They wanted my bank login, which I will absolutely not give to anyone. I tried a debit card but that also failed.
missedthecue•11h ago
I had a recurring charge on my Capital One credit card and canceled it from my Capital One app. The next month, the charge went through again and they proactively gave me an account credit equal to the charged amount, with an emailed apology. I'm not sure why they couldn't cancel it, or if it will go through again this month, but it surprised me!
nico•11h ago
I had a subscription with an account that I couldn’t access anymore, and there wasn’t any other way to cancel

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

__david__•10h ago
Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.
pimterry•5h ago
The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.

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.

wobfan•11h ago
Not gonna lie, I actually have canceled many service because of this single reason. If I get the feeling they want to hide these options specifically to keep me in a subscription, I immediately feel the urge to cancel even more, and also it gives me the feeling that the service itself is obviously, objectively, not good enough that they can just be honest and offer a easy cancel option - because they fear that too many people would.
tonyhart7•7h ago
You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial but sorry to tell you that "most" people is "forgot" they sign up something and not open it in years

that's happen more often than you think

also financial illiterate is real

LoganDark•6h ago
> You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial

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.

bombcar•4h ago
Sir, sorry to inform, but you do this:

> I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into

You are a minority in a minority that tracks at all! ;)

gmd63•1h ago
The issue is that many folks rely on and even manufacture financial illiteracy as part of their "business"

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.

babyshake•11h ago
You can use privacy.com as another commenter has written. But one catch is I believe you can be on the hook for subscriptions where your card no longer works but you haven't cancelled your subscription. So they can send you invoices and even send it to collections. Although I strongly feel that at least for transactions of a sufficiently small size (normal retail subscriptions) cancelling your card should be legally considered sufficient enough for voiding your future subscription. I'm open to hearing counter arguments but I think the consumer shouldn't have to jump through even the smallest of hoops setup by vendors in order to indicate that they are no longer interested in future transactions.
vincenzothgreat•11h ago
use an alias with an alias email, the Privacy.com card will accept any name and address. Never had any sort of issue in all the years using them
venkat223•10h ago
This type of activity is happening with Amazon Netflix and other medias also with various E-Commerce sites Apple particularly is asking for all particulars train to debit after the expiry of the period but is not allowing cancellation properly as the bandwth work remains down in many many areas sporadically we are not able to cancel at will.This is a user unfriendly activity which is monopolistic or coercive.People will lose faith in digitization slowly
anonzzzies•9h ago
I always try via official means, but, failing that, I just cancel the (virtual) card. I have been threatened a lot that if I do that, my first born will be punished etc but of course nothing ever happens. I don't live in the US though.
advisedwang•11h ago
What about subscriptions where you agreed to a long-term subscription (e.g. for a discounted rate)?
koiueo•10h ago
Those are usually charged once per agreed period (never seen it any other way)
kalleboo•10h ago
Adobe is an example where a yearly discounted subscription is billed monthly
rat9988•7h ago
They'll have to change their model or implement like a breakup fee depending of what would has been missed if you didn't have a discount.
sebbadk•10h ago
I work for a company called Subaio that does exactly that, but it only works because EU (and some other countries) consumer protection laws requires that companies have to let us cancel subscriptions. So we're mostly working with european banks for now.

The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.

average_r_user•7h ago
Could you point me to some European banks that integrate your product? My current bank doesn't have something similar, and I would like to have an option to view all my subscriptions at a glance
ivape•10h ago
I'd have different wallets for everything if everything took Bitcoin. I guess I could do that with generated credit card numbers but haven't bothered with it.
astatine•9h ago
You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.
bushbaba•9h ago
Yes there is https://www.privacy.com/ which gives you a unique virtual credit card per subscription, which you can cancel from the bank.
dmoy•9h ago
That... doesn't necessarily work though?

If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.

MangoToupe•7h ago
> 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.

dmoy•52m ago
> 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

codemac•9h ago
Nowadays a problem is the subscriptions are all multiplexed through apple, google, and amazon.

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.

eleveriven•8h ago
Feels like a killer feature just waiting for someone to nail it properly
colechristensen•8h ago
Any subscriptions that are paid through Apple Pay are like this. Apple also takes about a third of the money for the trouble.

This is _not_ the same as using the Apple credit card for a subscription.

thanatos519•7h ago
Here in the Netherlands, via my bank I can list all of my pre-approved transfers and block them. I'm pretty sure every bank here is required to support this. PayPal also has this feature.

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.

ldsd•7h ago
Be careful there. You can block further payments, but that won't necessarily cancel your subscription.

You may still be responsible for the payment, and may need to pay collection fees as well at that point.

Fluorescence•7h ago
In theory I can do this with standing orders / direct debit in the UK and there are some subscriptions where "cancelling the direct debit" is the official way to cancel. There should be no need for firms to reinvent recurring payments and store card details for their own ad hoc system. I don't know if it might disadvantage some people not familiar with managing direct debits though.

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.

alexey-salmin•7h ago
Revolut does that, at least in France. You can see and cancel both card subscriptions and direct debits
rlpb•6h ago
Legally, this isn't sufficient. Your subscription contract is independent of your payment method. If you don't pay, that doesn't necessarily mean that your subscription is cancelled, and you could end up in court and lose.

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.

immibis•6h ago
This would be illegal in western countries.
ghoul2•5h ago
Thats how it works in India: all your "repeating" charge authorizations show up on a portal maintained by the issuing bank. All services that charge via these authorizations send an SMS alert before they debit the next charge. At any time, you can go into the portal and cancel any of these authorizations. No need to talk to the charging co at all, though still, best to first cancel from them. Jus that they know its trivial for the user to go and cancel the auth, so no one makes it difficult to cancel.
whycome•2h ago
This is brilliant and simple. Canada could have this. Except the major telecommunications companies have a stranglehold on the govt and wouldn’t be for it.
tiahura•12h ago
The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1), which states that the agency “shall issue a preliminary regulatory analysis” whenever it proposes a rule expected to have a significant economic impact.

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).

Irongirl1•12h ago
FYI: Everyone just use privacy.com

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.

firesteelrain•8h ago
Never heard of this; thanks for the tip!
mrheosuper•7h ago
Great, another service that collects my purchase information.
Hnrobert42•5h ago
This is why I've never used these services.
Shank•7h ago
> So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will automatically decline.

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.

DaSHacka•4h ago
How could it override the decline if you cancel the card entirely in Privacy?
jabroni_salad•1h ago
It's an authorized recurring charge. Disabling the card only really works for sure on new charges. The only 'real' way to deauthorize it is to convince the merchant to do it for you. Every other method is just creating enough friction that you hope it will be too expensive for the merchant to fight back.
reginald78•4h ago
Yes, Capital One offers a similar virtual card service and when I read into the fine details it wasn't as useful as a thought. There were seemingly exceptions that could override spending limits for subscriptions and the control was mostly an illusion.
KomoD•7h ago
Then you risk getting sent to collections instead.
whamlastxmas•2h ago
I can use fake name and address with privacy cards
bramhaag•6h ago
Is there anything like this that accepts EU customers?
sensanaty•6h ago
Revolut has a disposable card feature. I'm sure there's some regular old school banks that have this as well, ING in the Netherlands does as far as I remember.
anon191928•5h ago
revolut and others still try to charge you, even if you cancel the VIRTUAL card. when you ask them, why and how they you do that, they say you have some sort of agreement for the subs. service and you need to end it on your own via them. Bank can't do that?? they said something like that to me. So they literally support the dark pattent side, not on your side obv.
diggan•6h ago
Your bank might offer this already, just to check in case you haven't already. I think all banks I've had in Spain and Sweden has offered this feature within their web portal.
pimterry•5h ago
Revolut along with quite a few other modern EU banks let you manage recurring billing directly - in Revolut I can pick any transaction in the app, click "Block future payments" and that vendor won't be able to bill my card again until I unblock them. That's separate from virtual/disposable cards - you can use your normal card and still block individual vendors.

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.

ourmandave•5h ago
Privacy.com is a fintech platform offering virtual debit cards to secure online transactions. Based in Iceland and partnered with FDIC-insured banks, the service allows users to control card usage through pausing, unpausing, or closing. Privacy.com prioritizes security through firewalls, encryption, and PCI DSS compliance.
blendergeek•4h ago
> Privacy.com prioritizes security through firewalls, encryption, and PCI DSS compliance.

That line of cyber security mumbo jumbo does not inspire confidence

crazygringo•3h ago
Then it just gets sent to collections, and worsens your credit score, so your next car loan or mortgage has a higher interest rate.

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.

db48x•11h ago
For those of you wondering what the actual decision says: <https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/25/07/243137P.pdf>
throwawaymaths•10h ago
Spectrum (cable/telephone/internet) kept me on the phone line for 30 minutes as i tried to cancel.
JohnTHaller•9h ago
Ask my girlfriend about my phone call with Time Warner (pre Spectrum) where I said the words "I want to cancel cable TV but keep internet" about two dozen times to 3 different people.
aaronbrethorst•10h ago
I wonder who's on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...

Bush 41: 2

Bush 43: 6

Obama: 1

Trump: 4

oh

unethical_ban•9h ago
If we had a Congress who knew what Signal, e-mail, or credit cards were, then we may get actual legislation protecting consumer rights.
bogwog•1h ago
The average age of congress members is 58 years old, which is 6 years older than the first cellphone call.

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.

barkingcat•8h ago
Dark pattern galore
eleveriven•8h ago
Honestly, it's wild that something as common-sense as "make canceling as easy as signing up" is this hard to implement
oblio•8h ago
It's not hard to implement, in the sense of "hard to implement software feature".

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.

beezlewax•8h ago
I've used a learning platform called Brilliant in the past. The cancellation process was so convoluted that it was impossible to cancel the account. Dark patterns and confusing language.

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.

fuzztester•7h ago
Do you mean brilliant.org ?
trueismywork•5h ago
In contrast in EU, I sent an email to my service to cancel and they forgot to cancel. I just sent them another email with proof of email and they realised they missed the old one and canceled retroactively and refunded money to my account.
pbh101•5m ago
This has not been my experience cancelling eu services.
injidup•4h ago
I call bullshit. https://help.brilliant.org/en/articles/741701-how-can-i-canc...
whycome•3h ago
What happens when you click the link in that article?

“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.

apwell23•2h ago
i only subscribe to services through app store on my iphone. even if costs me premium.
whamlastxmas•2h ago
I use privacy dot com cards I can turn off in a single click
apwell23•2h ago
doesn't stop it from being sent to collections.

wtf are ppl downvoting this. i had it happen to me.

derwiki•2h ago
I guess not; but I also use Privacy.com cards and have never ended up in collections when I pause a card to cancel a service.
guelo•6h ago
Of course it's going to cost more than $100 million if they have stop stealing from us.

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).

pjmlp•6h ago
The consumer protection laws are so bad the other side of Atlantic.

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.

b00ty4breakfast•6h ago
neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
scrubs•5h ago
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.

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.

idiotsecant•5h ago
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
DaSHacka•4h ago
And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
sneak•4h ago
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.

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.

DaSHacka•4h ago
> 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?

adgjlsfhk1•3h ago
well in the past year, we have stopped funding science in the US, arrested and deported thousands of foreign students here legally, removing the pipeline for the smartest people in the world to move to the US and start world changing companies, and started a trade war with the entire world, making American businesses much less competitive at buying/selling goods internationally.

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

bluGill•3h ago
It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US. However they have never seen any point - they mostly (not entirely) agree with the US and so it would be a waste of their limited time to do that instead of what they were doing instead.
bitcurious•2h ago
> It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US.

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.

bluGill•21m ago
In the 1950s that was true. By 1960 it was already changing. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s Europe was plenty rebuilt enough that they could have redirected their efforts to opposing the US, but they mostly choose not to. Sure the US had a head start, but they have plenty of power. China is moving in the direction of opposing the US in the world, and seeing results.
rfrey•2h ago
Corporations. European politics can be captured by large corporations the same way the US has been. It was unthinkable in the US, 50 years ago, that corporations would call the shots politically. It can happen elsewhere as well.
ptero•4h ago
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.

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.

ordinaryradical•4h ago
If it’s not America it will be China and I don’t think you want to live in that world.
DaSHacka•4h ago
With their population pyramid I doubt it'd stay that way for long, though.
dinfinity•3h ago
Depends on how far down the US is going to slide. It's sadly well underway to become much, much worse than China is (or will become).
scrubs•2h ago
It's not clear to me that China is batting that well. I do not wish bad upon the Chinese citizenry, and China has done well in its own day since the 1960s.

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 ...

rapind•1h ago
> US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich.

This and Citizens United.

rfrey•2h ago
It doesn't have to be China or any other country. It can be corporations who move to capture the governments in other countries the way they've done in the US.
scarface_74•1h ago
Why does it have to be China and why does it have to be any one country? Why can’t it be China, EU, and the US all having about the same influence?

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.

ordinaryradical•1h ago
Because there will always be someone with an advantage over the others.

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.

scarface_74•1h ago
While I’ve only personally spent a day in an EU country so far - a day trip from London to Paris last month (more coming over the years) - I would much rather see European values exported to the world than US values - lack of universal healthcare, gun violence, corporate takeover of government, anti-vax, anti-science nut cases, etc.
scarface_74•3h ago
I would too. If we agree that monopolies are bad for private industry, why isn’t it just as bad as having one world power. I think Trump and MAGA are uninformed idiots. But they have caused the EU to start building up their own military industry, countries to focus more on their own research and decouple themselves from the US. I can’t see how that’s a bad thing.

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.

MSFT_Edging•4h ago
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.

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.

xphilter•4h ago
They’re talking about those times we let women vote, implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow. Really overshot lol.
Arubis•3h ago
When we “overshot left” it was by electing a centrist cishet man who identified as Christian and had different colored skin from the prior presidents.

Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.

malfist•3h ago
We overshot so far to the left on the ACA that it was a Republican proposal a decade prior. We overshot on the right and just stripped health care away from 12 million people who can't afford it to pay for tax cuts for the rich
thrance•2h ago
Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.
fuzzy_biscuit•4h ago
I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite.

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.

nyeah•3h ago
"Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

HybridCurve•2h ago
The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy. Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.
claytongulick•3h ago
Did you read TFA? This had nothing to do with neoliberalism or whatever.

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.

delfinom•5h ago
Not the FTC's fault.

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.

sneak•4h ago
If the FTC can’t do what the FTC is supposed to do, then that is the FTC’s fault for continuing to exist. It’s unfit for purpose and should be shut down.
xphilter•4h ago
The ftc isn’t supposed to create laws though. I tend to overshoot on the consumer’s side, but the ftc is overstepping with actions like this. There should be a law passed on this point and then ftc can enforce. Or ftc can sue based on existing law and let courts buy their interpretation.
singleshot_•3h ago
> There should be a law passed on this point

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.

sorcerer-mar•3h ago
Even if we were to accept your premise (if broken, throw out), it's still Congress that decides whether the FTC exists or not.
evilduck•3h ago
The FTC have no say in choosing to exist or not exist, or what laws are passed that they are supposed to enforce. In some cases, an agency intentionally choosing to not carry out their duties would even be breaking the law and subject to penalty or punishment. How the FTC goes about interpreting their duties and then the court system correcting their behavior when they disagree or misbehave is the system working as intended. If they don't have laws to interpret for an issue though, that's a legislative problem.

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.

mrtksn•4h ago
True but generally speaking American companies usually have much better customer service and better refund policies than European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners the market or has no viable alternatives.

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.

mokash•3h ago
>True but generally speaking American companies usually have much better customer service and better refund policies than European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners the market or has no viable alternatives.

this does not track with my experience

mrtksn•3h ago
Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?

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.

noitpmeder•3h ago
To be honest I don't think they do "no question asked refunds" for the consumer's benefit -- probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return requests they get.

I'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large expensive items.

Calvin02•3h ago
Have you ever tried to return something bought at a clothing store? I made that mistake once in France.

You’re creating an absurd standard “repeatedly return large expensive items” but even every day things are way easier in the US.

mrtksn•2h ago
Exactly. Europe’s regulations are about the absolute bottom, not intended to be taken as the average experience.

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.

vladms•2h ago
I think it's more about the type of store. I was with acquaintances returning clothes at high end stores (meaning: expensive) and service was great. I would not try that at a low end store (meaning: cheap).

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.

potato3732842•2h ago
>probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return

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.

makeitdouble•2h ago
Isn't it best if you don't need refunds all the time ?

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.

oritsnile•1h ago
The same is true for Europe. I've never had an issue returning items on Amazon, whether they're for personal or business use (where you don't have the right to return items). The same goes for local and European chains.
wing-_-nuts•1h ago
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?

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.

glenstein•1h ago
>Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?

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.

sensanaty•1h ago
In the Netherlands literally every single store has no questions asked refunds for up to a month. Not that I have to do it often, but for example Coolblue and Bol both offer free returns within a month. Pretty much any webstore I have literally ever used has the same refund policies. Not to mention that the topic of this thread is already in-place EU wide, so there's an obvious win there too.
lossolo•46m ago
> Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the time

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.

aqme28•4h ago
Absolutely. I don't know if it's the FTC or FCC, but the moment I swap back to my American SIM card on trips to the US, I start getting spam texts that I cannot get rid of. Meanwhile I get absolutely zero of these with my European number.
rafram•2h ago
People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they? WhatsApp spam is very pervasive, though.
xcf_seetan•2h ago
Actually I am european and use sms a lot. Dont even have WhatsApp installed... :)
xxs•1h ago
>People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they

Europe is very far from being a single entity. Yet, SMS/RCS is popular enough, and in many countries WhatsApp is non-existent.

sabellito•3h ago
Consumer protection laws are mostly fine in Brazil and Uruguay, and I'd bet also on more countries on the other side of the Atlantic.
dudeinjapan•2h ago
A Civil law (Roman law) system might have upheld the FTC's click-to-cancel rule in spite of missteps because it serves the public good. But in common law, process is king--as is protecting individual rights (including the rights of shady marketers.)
api•5h ago
Disputing charges through banks will become the way to cancel things.
everdrive•4h ago
One consequence here that people need to think about is that ALL subscription services should be viewed with suspicion. Once you sign up how much of your life will be deranged simply by trying to cancel the service. It's a hidden cost which shouldn't be forgotten.
pona-a•4h ago
So there's a business argument for this regulation. If the consumers feel unsafe giving their credit cards to most companies, they'll spend less on subscription services in total, harming the industry more than they gain from milking zombie customers.
whycome•3h ago
Is zombie customer an official term. And how much of their profits are from that sector? Is this like airlines over selling seats?
adgjlsfhk1•2h ago
zombie purchasers is the business model of basically every gym. they lose money on the people that actually show up. the money makers are the people who sign up for a membership, go once or twice and then forget to cancel (or purchased a full year at once)
quitit•3h ago
This is one of the reasons why providers -hate- IAP subscriptions, even if the profit share was 0%, they'd still not be happy because with IAP it's just one click to cancel.

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.

cyral•2h ago
Well, the "one click" cancel is hidden deep in the settings app - and when customers contact us asking to cancel, they don't like to hear that we cannot cancel or refund them from our end. (Apple doesn't even provide a way to look up the customer. Most people don't understand that Apple is actually managing the entire billing process)
SuperSandro2000•4h ago
3rd world country customer protection laws...
ChoGGi•3h ago
I bet Trump will surely sign an executive order putting click to cancel into place any day now.
John23832•2h ago
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.

thrance•2h ago
It serves the current administration's in-group: the ultra-wealthy.
whamlastxmas•2h ago
Got a surprise for you if you think any admins in group isn’t the ultra wealthy
XorNot•2h ago
"this paper cut is exactly the same as sticking my arm in a wood chipper, which is why I chose the latter..."
platevoltage•1h ago
“It’s like a uniparty bruh”
pessimizer•42m ago
Actually Republicans are like demons and Democrats are like angels, which is why their policies are so distinct. I am very sophisticated.
rayiner•2h ago
Courts don’t make decisions on whether executive rules are told or bad, serve consumers or not. The main oversight they have is ensuring compliance with procedural rules and statutory technicalities.
Devasta•2h ago
That hasn't been true this century at the very least.
cogman10•1h ago
Yeah, I take a dim view of the courts in general these days. However, this looks black and white. The FTC was trying to rush in the change before Trump took office and that backfired on them.

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.

duped•1h ago
Upon plain inspection, this is untrue.
hiAndrewQuinn•2h ago
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.

cogman10•1h ago
The issue with this argument is that services follow industry standards. You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.

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.

hiAndrewQuinn•1h ago
> You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.

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.

GolfPopper•57m ago
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.
giingyui•1h ago
Courts don’t only serve consumers and citizens. They also have to serve corporations. This is not a flippant remark; corporations also have rights to defend.
sophacles•1h ago
Who the fuck cares? Seriously - a corporation is a piece of paper that separates ownership from responsibility. It's already a fucking stupid idea - You're deeply liable if you can't keep you trees maintained, or your car under control, but if you can't control you company, it's no problem?

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.

zaphar•4m ago
Then get legislation through congress to change it. The courts are not there to fix legislation unless it is superseded by other higher legal authorities. Such as the constitution national or state. Current legislation gives them corporations rights. If you think that is wrong then the way to change it is to get people elected who can change that legislation.
jonathanlb•1h ago
In theory, courts don't "serve" anyone, but they do serve the rule of law. Courts _should_ remain impartial. Given this, it's problematic when the rule of law favors corporations over consumer interests, e.g. Federal Arbitration Act, Citizens United, thanks to corporate lobbying.
GuinansEyebrows•53m ago
> This is not a flippant remark; corporations also have rights to defend.

this is Bad, Actually

libraryatnight•1h ago
A significant portion of this community believes in "move fast and break things," but just for businesses, when it comes to helping people - slow down!
Herring•59m ago
To be fair, helping people like them is deadly to your community. That's what theyre signalling, and I think they might have a point. You can't just give people money (power) because they're poor - look at Latinos voting for Trump. Their ethics have to also be right.
caesil•1h ago
If you actually bother to click through and read the article, you'd find the court expressed sympathies with the intent of the rule, but the FTC "is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more", and they did not do that.

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

julienchastang•1h ago
> "If you actually bother to click through and read the article,"

HN guidelines ask that you say "The article mentions that".[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mh-•47m ago
I appreciate the sentiment, but if the comment they were replying to adhered to those guidelines, there wouldn't have been a comment to reply to.
exabrial•1h ago
^ This.

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.

hiddencost•48m ago
Which is basically a lie designed to appeal to credulous people like you.
fumeux_fume•44m ago
This is a pretty narrow view. A lot of businesses--whose bread and butter (well maybe just the butter) is keeping people locked into subscriptions they don't want--put a large effort in challenging this rule. They would have fought it like hell during the "analysis" which would have stretched into the Trump presidency were it would surely would have been killed. Even if the analysis had been completed, it's likely the courts would have struck it down for overreach (like Dept of Education's student loan forgiveness). It died because a lot business interests are opposed to it.
pessimizer•35m ago
I don't know what you mean by "narrow" here. It sounds like you're saying that they did it at the last minute, and failed to finish. But you're saying that since the next administration would "surely" never do click to cancel, that somehow should immunize the FTC from following their own regulations? The next administration was elected.

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.

rtkwe•35m ago
Depends on how accurate you think the $100 million estimated impact from the lower court is. When the FTC did the analysis they came up with a lower impact so they didn't have to do it. I'd be more willing to believe they got it right than a single judge did.
zaphar•9m ago
Why do you think the FTC analysis was more accurate than the opposing sides? The judges, of whom there were multiple, were going off of opposing side argumentation not just their own subjective opinion. That's how courts in the US work.
NickC25•51m ago
This benefits the lawmaker's clients - the large corporations. Or maybe the lawmakers are the clients.

Either way this ruling was bought and paid for.

derektank•12m ago
People are served by knowing that, regardless of what the law says, it will be applied consistently. It's on the legislature to write new law if the old law is bad, not the judiciary.
NoMoreNicksLeft•2h ago
I'm not unsympathetic to those who need to cancel a gym membership or whatever. But Congress is too lazy or cowardly to do it themselves, so they delegated, and the courts have been reluctant to allow delegation lately... Congress knows that too.

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.

nashashmi•2h ago
ELI5: FTC said the rule is a cheap expense on corps. An admin judge says it is quite expensive. FTC is supposed to follow a particular procedure for expensive rules. FTC didn’t follow so judges ruled against the regulation.

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.

fumeux_fume•2h ago
I wonder if the decision to forgo the review process was a cynical gamble knowing it would be slow-walked to death or if it was done to score quick points with little concern given to how a legal challenge would play out in the future.
doitformango•1h ago
This is an even better reason to always use Virtual Credit Cards or Paypal: you can cut off the source of funding with a single click.

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.

gmd63•1h ago
Another value destroying milestone of the felon seditionist's megagrift administration

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.

DrNosferatu•1h ago
Don't you just love getting rid of those pesky socialist regulations?
DrNosferatu•1h ago
#irony

(unfortunately, this seems necessary here on HN)

bluetidepro•45m ago
Slightly related: For all the crap the iOS store gets for many (good) reasons, this is one reason I actually LOVE to buy subscriptions through iOS/Apple when that option is available for a platform. They have the most simple cancellation process to manage all your subscriptions in one place. Sometimes it costs a $1 or more to buy through iOS but it's worth it to easily cancel without any hoops.
ApolloFortyNine•21m ago
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.

charles_f•14m ago
> 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,"

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?

KittenInABox•5m ago
I don't understand why corporations can be as malicious and sloppy as they want but actually bringing them to justice requires absolute correctness on every level including bad-faith technicality interpretation.