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US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

arstechnica.com

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Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#291

Post by cogman10 »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #266
John23832 wrote: post #236

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.

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 differenc…

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.

Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#292

Post by rayiner »

martythemaniak wrote: post #288
rayiner wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non-Federalist Society folks think that “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. How can right wing judges even compete with that? I think we may have drastically different understandings of what “the law” is.

Yeah, those crazy woke judges that think that the government should not be able to bust into your bedroom and arrest you because you used a condom.

“The law” as most people understand it allows the government to regulate the sale and use of medical products. There’s a libertarian reading of the constitution under which Griswold makes sense. But under it, the FDA is probably unconstitutional.

Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#293

Post by AStonesThrow »

martythemaniak wrote: post #288
rayiner wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non-Federalist Society folks think that “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. How can right wing judges even compete with that? I think we may have drastically different understandings of what “the law” is.

Yeah, those crazy woke judges that think that the government should not be able to bust into your bedroom and arrest you because you used a condom.

[dead]

Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#294

Post by rayiner »

hobs wrote: post #287
rayiner wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The non-Federalist Society folks think that “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. How can right wing judges even compete with that? I think we may have drastically different understandings of what “the law” is.

Yes of course, bringing up a whataboutism while the supreme court runs roughshod over current law is totally the point right? We need these stout champions of conservatism because the left is so crazy that we need to check them, that's why we need to rewrite the constitution to fit whatever trump is doing this week, right? Bringing up the boogieman of the left while the right is literally doing their best to bring th…

After we have 60 years of Federalist Society judges looking for what they can find in the “emanations from penumbras” of the second amendment and INA, maybe then I’ll care about the accusation of hypocrisy.

Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#296

Post by rapind »

scrubs wrote: post #239
dinfinity wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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…

> US Congress has become an institutional zero especially since Gingrich.

This and Citizens United.

Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#297

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #147
bpodgursky wrote: post #15

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 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 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.

Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#298

Post by xxs »

rafram wrote: post #247
aqme28 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they? WhatsApp spam is very pervasive, though.

>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.

Re: US Court nullifies FTC requirement for click-to-cancel

#300

Post by bpodgursky »

braiamp wrote: post #169
avhception wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

> 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.

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