Earlier quoted context omitted.
who warned them?
A then-commissioner who is now the head of the FTC.
That commissioner also hated the fact that consumers were going to stop being robbed by big corps.
US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
171–180 of 599 posts
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
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 futur…
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.
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please point to an example of these warnings.
> 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…
Why are you pasting the article when it doesn't include any warnings that were given to the ftc at the time?
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#174From 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 imp…
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…
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.
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because systematic corruption presumably?
More that they mistakenly thought that doing the right thing meant they didn't have to do the thing right.
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.
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that it takes more than 24 hours to put a 1 click cancel button is alien to me.
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
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?
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#178I'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.
I call bullshit.
https://help.brilliant.org/en/articles/741701-how-can-i-canc...
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
The "other side" here is the political group that is consistently anti-regulation, anti-consumer, anti-government.
Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 futur…
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.
And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?