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California law requires businesses to let you cancel your subscription online

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

#451

Post by patrickaljord »

kristiandupont wrote: post #395
thecrazyone wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a libertarian and I don't know what to say. There will be shitty companies as well I guess, but when they lose customers due to such practices, they will learn? If they don't learn they will go out of business. You're stuck with a bad govt law, no efficient weeding out process exists.

The thing about the invisible hand is that it works really well if you buy a chocolate bar that you don't like. The next day, you won't buy that same chocolate bar. However, when a handsome man in a suit offers my cousin a loan for a house that she can't afford and puts her in severe financial trouble, she might very well not use that bank again the next time she's looking for a loan (in maybe 30 years), but that doe…

The fact that banks are allowed to give loans with money they don't have to people who can't repay them is mostly because of that "assistance".

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

#452

Post by adam-a »

isostatic wrote: post #404
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The best thing to do is issue a chargeback. They had me sign over my direct withdrawal banking details the day I signed up. I regret doing that.

Can you not cancel? In the UK its a matter of logging into the bank and pressing "cancel" on the list of direct debits. Not only that but any mistaken withdrawal is refunded.

This is actually not always reliable, many larger institutions are able to re-enable the DD and continue charging you. I had this with my council tax after I moved out and cancelled it from my end. There are many complaints about the same behaviour from phone companies, insurance companies, and others.

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

#453

Post by lousyd »

tarellel wrote: post #332
brandonbloom wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Comcast and SiriusXM are by far the worst I've ever come across. They demand explanations, try to cut you deals, claim they have to transfer you to their manager who attempts to up sale you. I seriously had to get one of my debit cards reissued in order to get charges to stop and to get my XM radio account closed out.

I just cancelled SiriusXM earlier this week. They asked why and I said I just don't listen to it enough. They offered a month of a different package free. I said no. And that was it.

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

#455

Post by dalbasal »

claudius wrote: post #429
dalbasal wrote: post #423

There are some built in problems when it comes to this sort of regulator-esque legislation. If a company doesn't want to "do X," but is being forced to, the specific, legalistically deconstructed definition of 'X' gets very important. On the path between the kind of grand moral statements politicians trade in to the way corporate lawyers use language... a lot gets lost A common 'X' is " inform customers of something…

Alternatively, don’t force the company to accept/deny specific forms of communication; simply make it clear that any communication is sufficient to cancel a contract. There’s no point for a company to build a convoluted website if any customer knows they can send an email to info@example.com or a direct message or a text "I cancel my contract with you, my account number is 1234." and the only claim the company could…

This is probably the type of suggection a regulatory "hawk" would make. Essentially, make your next cat-and-mouse move big. "Lets see you get around that one, industry.!"

They see how easy/optimized subscriptions are, and how hard/optimized cancellations are. They see the regulatory cat-and-mouse game. Conclude that "industry" is acting in bad faith, and suggest an FU rule like that.

Industry will respond (correctly) that this kind of a proposal puts a big burden on them, and makes managing subscriptions very hard and expensive.

I think it's a bad idea for the same reason you can't stop hyperinflation by yelling at retailers to stop their "greedy price gouging." Swimming directly into a persistant economic incentives current is hard. "Complying" becomes implementing the minimum standard which is still legal.

A better approach (IMO, I am not a policy maker) would be to (1) recognize the major economic incentives (2) avoid leaving low level decision making (implementation) in the hands of those whose economic incentives are opposed to your goals. (3) if you absolutely must force companies to act against their own interest, be extremely prescriptive. Leave nothing open ended and do as little of this as possible.

In this case, I don't think it's that hard. Regulate payment providers, particularly CCs. They already have a regulator, so no structural changes (or even legislation, possibly) is necessary.

(1) Make subscriptions an explicit type of thing. (2) Enforce a minimum amount of information that the payment provider must receive, in order to honour the subscription. (3) display this information to customers. Monthly paper statements are fine. (4) Enforce a standard whereby consumers can cancel recurring payments by contacting the payment provider.

A credit card service, bank, bitcoin wallet or whatever has no incentive to make cancelations clunky. Simply putting the onus on them is probably sufficient regulation. The better ones will probably give you a nice app/web view with extra user friendly features the regulator never even thought of. For example, they might alert you when "introductory price" periods end or keep track of "minimum durations" to let you know when your contract expires.

A have a similar view on cookie laws & parts of GDPR. Instead of leaving everything up to websites (who have an incentive to make you give up all your rights), regulate the data browsers & ISPs share with a website. They're not as vested in minimizing user rights.

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

#456

Post by jessriedel »

TomMckenny wrote: post #419
jessriedel wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "legal theory" is that you signed up for the credit card company to be a trusted middle man and to ajudicate exactly these sorts of disputes. This is part of value they provide.

It turns out you can not put anything you want in a contract. You can't contract away fundamental rights, for example you can't contract to vote a certain way. But perhaps rather than suggesting that everything in a contract is always valid, maybe you are referring to DIRECTV, Inc. v. Imburgia. And somehow that decision can be stretched to cover this case. Even so, it is clear that the call center is not acing as rem…

> suggesting that everything in a contract is always valid

I didn't suggest anything like that. Rather, things in contracts are valid by default.

This isn't even a matter of onerous arbitration clauses (for disputes between the business and the consumer) being burried in fine print that no one reads. (Those have been regulated in some jurisdictions, but are mostly legal.) For credit cards, the arbitration is between the consumer and a 3rd party to the consumer's contract (the merchant), and literally is part of the value provided. People would use credit cards less if the service was discontinued.

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

#457

Post by mcintyre1994 »

olliej wrote: post #320
sonnyblarney wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I didn't realize PayPal could dip into my checking account any time they wanted to." EBay did this to me once, I think this is an American thing, doesn't happen here in Canada like that.

Oh yeah, this was one of the most insane things I experienced moving to the US. If someone has your bank account number they can withdraw money from it. For example the errands bank account authentication mechanism is to withdraw some money from your account, and then ask you how much they took. I honestly could not believe it. It gets better: if you have someone’s bank account number you still cannot transfer money…

> For example the errands bank account authentication mechanism is to withdraw some money from your account, and then ask you how much they took. I honestly could not believe it.

That is crazy! I remember Paypal doing the opposite in the UK, they made 2 or 3 tiny deposits and asked how much they were.

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

#458

Post by mcintyre1994 »

adam-a wrote: post #452
isostatic wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you not cancel? In the UK its a matter of logging into the bank and pressing "cancel" on the list of direct debits. Not only that but any mistaken withdrawal is refunded.

This is actually not always reliable, many larger institutions are able to re-enable the DD and continue charging you. I had this with my council tax after I moved out and cancelled it from my end. There are many complaints about the same behaviour from phone companies, insurance companies, and others.

Fitness First did this to me, probably a genuine error their side that they didn't cancel my account properly but I'd cancelled the DD with my bank and it re-appeared. I contacted the bank about it and they offered to put a lock on my account so I have to be contacted about any future Direct Debits which seems like it should be the default.

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

#459

Post by codedokode »

Recurring payments are implemented in the worst way possible. You cannot see a list of your subscriptions online, cannot see how much you have spent, cannot stop or cancel them. And even if you don't use some service anymore, they still can charge you. That is because systems like Visa earn money only when you spend and have no motivation to make cancelling easier.
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