Live data from Hacker News

California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

niemanlab.org

181–190 of 554 posts

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#181
post #12

For places that require a phone call I came up with a trick to cancel via email. If they reply back via email and say I have to call them, I tell them I'm deaf and can't talk on the phone. Works every time.

but would not that make you feel a little guilty as you are lying to the person just to cancel a subscription?

Why would one feel guilty about it?

This is a utility-maximizing lie. You're saving both yourself and the other person time. Unless you subscribe to some belief-system that holds truth-telling to be some sort of moral good in and of itself, everyone is better off.

And that's aside from the fact that the patter you'll hear trying to keep you paying is going to be full of, at the very least, deceptive statements lacking any objective truth or falsity.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#182

While I like the spirit of this law (rare for me with CA laws), I expect it to be ruled unconstitutional as attempting to regulate interstate commerce, whose so jurisdiction is under US Congress.

Not sure it would hold up in the Supreme Court. Provided the law is worded strictly to apply to CA citizens / only when corporations are serving CA citizens there is little to make an interstate regulation argument on. And there is also international precedence (EU GDPR) which could guide court opinion. Maybe it's just wishful thinking but that's my $0.02.

GDPR isn't a relevant precedent as there isn't a precedent -- GDPR hasn't been challenged in court, not the least, a US court.

GDPR also has no relevance for US interstate commerce.

South Dakota vs. Wayfair overturned the Quill decision, and, the Quill decision would have been the controlling precedent in any constitutional challenge, based on physical nexus. However, that all changed with Wayfair.

One of the key arguments in the overturn of Quill were that Quill created, rather than resolved market distortions. Essentially, Quill (according to the ruling in SD v Wayfair,) created a tax shelter for businesses that limit their physical presence in a state. The problem with Quill is that it disadvantaged economically identical actors for arbitrary reasons -- a small shop with a few items in a warehouse in a state would have to pay taxes on everything they sold in the state, while a large business (such as Wayfair) with no physical presence in the state would be advantaged by not having to charge a tax on the exact same items. Helping customers evade a lawful tax unfairly shifts an increased share of the taxes to those consumers who buy from competitors with a physical presence in the State.

"Quill’s physical presence rule has limited States’ ability to seek long-term prosperity and has prevented market participants from competing on an even playing field."

So now, we look at the California law requiring online cancellations. It would be an extremely difficult argument to cite SD vs. Wayfair since the online cancellation requirement isn't creating a disadvantage on market participants or the states themselves. Lost economic development due to the imbalance created by Quill was cited repeatedly as a flaw in Quill. An online cancellation requirement is going to be very difficult to prove as having a deleterious effect on economic activity/growth/development as was clearly demonstrated in the majority opinion for Wayfair. Wayfair was essentially about tax shelters. The California law doesn't correct any particular economic harm.

However, that being said, any constitutional challenge to the California Law would likely fall short because the Supreme Court interpretation of the Commerce Clause essentially says that laws ought not present an "undue burden" on interstate trade. Allowing for online cancellation, would be, to say the least, a stretch to argue that it places an undue burden on doing business with people within the state. That's why, if this law were to go to court, it would be upheld since someone like the New York Times would have a hard time proving an "undue burden." Ironically (to me,) being required to collect sales tax in all 50 states as well as the thousands of individual jurisdictions (including multiple jurisdictions even within cities, thanks to economic reinvestment zones) -- that to me, seems like a massively undue burden. However, as the court rules in Wayfair, that burden is less important than the economic discrimination that was happening (i.e. a local online shop vs. an out of state online shop being burdened unequally despite selling the exact same product.)

As an aside, I might argue that a business without a physical presence in the state isn't availing themselves to the infrastructure or public services of that state, however they are being asked to pay for those infrastructure and services. Shipping companies actually do the deliveries and they, of course, are paying the taxes for their locality. But that's another debate. Incidentally, justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer joined Roberts's Wayfair dissent, in which he stated that Congress ought to be making the laws and not the courts. I never thought I'd agree with Kagan and Sotomayor on anything, but it is strange times in which we live.

In anyone's interested, Ginsburg, Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas, Kennedy were in the majority on the Wayfair case while Breyer, Sotomayor, Roberts and Kagan were in the dissent. http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/south-dakota-v-wa...

It was a 5-4 but not how you would have expected!

Anyway, to the point, Quill would have made a challenge to the California law rather easy, but now, the California law will likely pass a Constitutional challenge based on the "undue burden" test established by the courts.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#183
post #72

Are you actually deaf? Or is lying to get exceptions that are meant for the disabled actually legal?

I did think about this, but I don't really think I'm taking anything away from the actually deaf. It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request. I agre…

First of all, I agree.

Yet I think I have a stigma claiming illness or disability... don't know. So, next time I'm going to try this:

  I am a foreigner and have serious issues understanding 
  spoken English. Please avoid calling me and let us try to 
  resolve the issue over email.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#185
post #7

Does this apply to B2C only or also B2B?

It doesn't matter. Though, to be fair, most B2B sales aren't actually completed online. For example, if you deal with Salesforce, you complete the sale in an offline process. This law states that an online purchase should have an online cancellation. It doesn't apply to "tech" -- it applies to the sales process. So a guy selling you insurance over the phone -- they aren't required to allow online cancellation. However, if you purchased the product/subscription online, then you should be allowed to cancel online. Basically, the venue of the sale needs to be equivalent to the venue of the cancellation.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#186
Another consumer first law I would like to see is that if a service detects you haven’t used it in the previous period, they refund your subscription fee.

There is so much wasted money on zombie subscriptions that people forget about.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#187

Another consumer first law I would like to see is that if a service detects you haven’t used it in the previous period, they refund your subscription fee. There is so much wasted money on zombie subscriptions that people forget about.

It’s not wasted, the money goes to the business.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#188

My trick to avoid the long retentions go around is to tell them I'm leaving their service area. Why are you looking to cancel your phone plan? Leaving the country. They know they can't win me over and so they don't even try.

I've done this several times with Comcast, but it failed with Time Warner when I moved out of NYC. They demand to know why you are canceling and have some sort of way to extract money out of you for every scenario, including moving out of their service area. In that case, they transfer you to another phone system that helps you find a provider at your new address and, presumably, nets them a referral fee of some kind. Meanwhile, if you try any excuse to quit that they haven't accounted for, they tell you "yes sir" and redirect your call to that service as a fallback catch-all. Truly despicable.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are experiencing higher than normal call volume. Every. Single. Day. I would like to give executives the option to stop this or go to prison for this never ending nonsense. I think most would choose to stop.

Relatedly, I've been flying a lot more than usual in the last couple of months. Every single flight, the boarding announcements start with something along the lines of "this plane is going to be more full than usual, so we're going to need to check some of your carry-ons". Well guess what, United? Maybe if you didn't cram passengers into the fuselage like sardines in a goddamn tin can, you'd have enough room for ever…

I've learned that storage is rarely the issue - they do this to reduce boarding time to stay on schedule. I often board later in the line and there is still plenty of space. Really they should just ban carry-on rollers for non-elderly, able people, they're the ones people spend ages trying to jam in.

Re: California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

#190
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did think about this, but I don't really think I'm taking anything away from the actually deaf. It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request. I agre…

Finally! It's nice to see an attempt at a level-headed response, and from the person it was actually directed to (and that you had actually put thought into this). Funny enough, though, no one's actually answered the question I actually asked, which I still have... which is whether this is legal?

There aren't really that many things I can say to you, a private citizen, that are prima facie illegal. Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].

That changes when talking to some LEOs, doctors about certain things in some places, swearing to facts in official contexts and that sort of thing.

But generally speaking, I can lie to you all day long about anything I want. Which is as it has to be, at least if we want to navigate daily life without a full-time lawyer as a companion.

[1] And there's blackmail, which is a weird one - we know it is "wrong", but it is hard to formulate a legal theory as to why, because a perfectly legal act (disclosing embarrassing info about someone, for instance) becomes illegal only after a coercive warning giving the victim a chance to stop it.

Post reply on HN