I'm sorry but if the companies bottom line depends on forgotten subscriptions you dont get to cry foul when your dark practices need to be removed.
Nearly any mandated changes to nearly any company's software no matter what business they are in will incur costs. The FTC is required to take extra care when regulating in the case when those costs will be high.
In MAGA terms - if your business cannot survive in free market competition without scam schemes - it’s “unamerican” and shouldn’t be a business.
There are numerous states with an existing "click to cancel" regulation. If you're compliant with those states then that implementation was federally compliant as well.
The only huge cost is a drop in revenue not an increase in cost.
Couldn't even sign the stop killing games thing since that's EU!
So, basically, for largish changes, the rules say you have to do some/lots of (I wouldn’t know which) extra work to check that a change will have the intended effect.
This should be a law that congress passes, not a rule that the executive branch passes. Demand your congressmen do their job my encoding this into a real law.
Nor does it help to have a joint proposal. People who work across the aisle are seen as traitors -- they cannot be trusted to do the vital work of shooting down everything that the other side proposes.
It doesn't matter if the proposal is overwhelmingly supported. You will get very little credit from your constituents even if it passes. As much as people would like this bill, it's nobody's top priority.
Congress is barely able to pass anything. Frequently, it can't even pass a budget -- the basic operation of just keeping the lights on. Everything else is renaming post offices.
The entire point of the civil service is to pass basic functionality off onto a nonpartisan set of functionaries. But those functionaries are now widely considered the enemy, and so that method of accomplishing governance is also blocked. Congress will not re-open it, for exactly the same reasons that governance was blocked in the first place.
glances around nervously
I guess my hope here was at least there would be _something_. Trying to unsubscribe from spam is an absolute disaster now. CAN-SPAM is a joke. The only option I really have is blocking senders, which is an endless game of whack-a-mole.
i discovered a quest lab in my area that was either hacked or had someone working there that sold my email address to scammers since it was the only place i ever gave that unique email to. scary world!
Although the FTC initially claimed the rule would fall below that threshold, an administrative law judge later found that compliance costs would exceed it—unless every business somehow managed to implement the rule using fewer than 23 hours of professional services at the lowest possible rate. The court concluded that the FTC’s failure to issue a separate preliminary analysis for public review deprived stakeholders of a meaningful opportunity to challenge or shape the rule, rendering it procedurally invalid.
So no, the unanimous ruling by the Eighth Circuit didn’t kill the Biden-era regulation because the judges were Republican appointees. It was struck down because bureaucratic procedures weren't followed. Its a shame because I believe canceling subscriptions should be easy. It often is not in the U.S. (I’m looking at you adobe)this really undermines consumer interests :(
I mean that's one way to comply with "click to cancel". You could also make signing up more difficult and I doubt that would take 23 hours.
For now, if the unsubscribe process isn't obvious or takes me more than a couple minutes, I cancel the virtual card I gave that business.
Yes, this is a ridiculous state of things, but such is the world we live in, here in North America anyway.
Then you get sent to collections and pay with your credit report
https://www.wcvb.com/article/mass-woman-struggles-to-cancel-...
(577 points, 3 days ago, 533 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504699
(225 points, 2 days ago, 31 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44505675
Oh, it's a nation wide injunction; Not really a rule of law ruling then?
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca8.110...
LoL
This way, it's impossible for them to charge you for renewal. You can even forget about cancelling.
I'm not saying this because I agree with it, but because you should still be careful with what you sign up for. Simply declining to pay doesn't legally absolve you of your obligation to pay.
But if they have very shady and cumbersome cancellation policies and procedures, wouldn't you be able to win by good faith?
I assume you could also lie and say that you lost your card and also prove that you didn't use the service anyway.
I do find it fascinating that one administrator has the ability to claim, seemingly from thin air, that it would be more than 100mil and so cancel the entire rule. Wouldn't it be better if the rule was reviewed AFTER the year to determine if modifications or Analysis should be performed?
Seems that when it comes to consumer protections in the US the companies are ALWAYS given the benefit of the doubt.
I have no idea why the US FTC didn't do an impact analysis. I have no idea even how they decided of deadlines for compliance without one. (It's not easy to write a decision like this without some data.)
But yeah, the US consumer protection is really lacking, and this decision only reinforces it.
Policy is hard. Ideology is easy. Reading these comments, it appears that most of you haven't a clue how the sausage is actually made.
I recently tried to downgrade Xfinity service. App did not have the button so I had to call. First, I had to battle my way out of the robotic loop. Then, when I finally got to a human support person, they kept trying to upsell me on additional services. I told them that I wanted to downgrade. Since this would probably would hurt their performance score, they redirected me to another rep after fiddling for 30 minutes.
When I was transferred, I became more angry. I finally got the new rep to downgrade my service when I threatened to cancel. All-in-all the whole thing took about an hour.
</RANT>
We absolutely need 1-click cancellation or plan change buttons on these service providers' websites.
Me: You guys upped my bill from $45/mo to $110/mo, I'd like to go back to my old price or cancel.
Xfinity: Are you sure?
Me: Yes.
Xfinity: Okay, we are sorry to see you leave, please stay on the line for a survey.
It was the first time I spent less than 10 minutes on the phone with them. Thankfully they were our back-up internet when our fiber went down.
camillomiller•6h ago
sksrbWgbfK•6h ago
delichon•6h ago
efitz•5h ago
This rule was passed by the Biden administration. Don’t make it about politics when it’s not.
andrewla•5h ago
It is for Congress to act on this, simple as that.