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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

#391

Post by rtkwe »

zaphar wrote: post #350
rtkwe wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how accurate you think the >$100 million estimated impact from the lower court is. When the FTC did the analysis they came up with a lower impact so they didn't have to do it. I'd be more willing to believe they got it right than a single judge did.

Why do you think the FTC analysis was more accurate than the opposing sides? The judges, of whom there were multiple, were going off of opposing side argumentation not just their own subjective opinion. That's how courts in the US work.

The companies suing to stop this have every reason to massively inflate the difficulty and cost of compliance to continue their long established dark patterns of trapping people in difficult to cancel subscriptions. Judges are not experts in the field and have a hard time evaluating the actual credibility of various presented estimates, you see it all the time with long debunked forensic evidence techniques being accepted still years later by judges and courts.

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

#392

Post by mgkimsal »

cogman10 wrote: post #291
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 simpl…

> 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.

It's not click to cancel, but... airlines will charge extra for the right to cancel with a refund. Cheapest ticket is non-refundable, higher priced in refundable. But these are finite resources - seats, dates/times, etc. Not infinite capacity SaaS platforms.

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

#393

Post by cryptonector »

gmd63 wrote: post #316

Another value destroying milestone of the felon seditionist's megagrift administration It is trivially easy to capture the intent to cancel and allow customers to execute in one click. Any business that does otherwise is actively expending energy to prey upon economic surplus and add to deadweight loss.

He had zero to do with this. This is on Lina Khan.

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

#394

Post by fuomag9 »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #268
apwell23 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i only subscribe to services through app store on my iphone. even if costs me premium.

I use privacy dot com cards I can turn off in a single click

That service doesn’t exist in Europe unfortunately, I have to use Revolut for that

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

#395

Post by cryptonector »

api wrote: post #163

Disputing charges through banks will become the way to cancel things.

Not really. Lots of people in this thread explain why not:

- it's not foolproof as many of those cards will allow the merchant to override

- their claim can get sent to collections and hurt your credit score

- you can get canceled

Seriously, if you cancel payment on a company, they'll never do business with you again, and when it's a large and difficult-to-do-without company it can hurt.

Telling people to cancel payment to cancel is just bad advice that will hurt them.

We really need strong regulation here. There is no substitute.

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

#396

Post by okanat »

mindwork wrote: post #386
pjmlp wrote: post #140

The consumer protection laws are so bad the other side of Atlantic. Most European countries, have their own version of consumer protection agencies, usually any kind of complaint gets sorted out, even if takes a couple months. If they fail for whatever reason, there is still the top European one. Most of the time I read about FTC, it appears to side with the wrong guys.

At the same time European laws got whole internet littered with "Accept cookies" banners

This is a persistent stupid take but many HN readers are also on the wrong side of the consumer protection. Those startups don't make money out of thin air eh?

Once again. The full consumer protection would be banning behavior-based advertisement completely, which I would welcome. GDPR is striking a balance. It forces the companies to ask if they are going to collect data and use it in any other purpose from delivering the information / service.

Almost all of the web is feeding data into Google's ad and statistics services which are used to profile people and completely out of scope. That's the minimum. Worser services feed your data into every single PII broker. If you don't collect such data, no banners are necessary. If you need an address and an email to just ship a product, you need 0 cookie banners. The websites can also do geo-fencing so you don't see any banners. They don't want to spend any money to engineers though.

But no, it is EU's fault to create a balanced law. Companies should be violating you and your pricacy left and right. That's their right, isn't it.

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

#397

Post by marcusverus »

thrance wrote: post #241
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.

It serves the current administration's in-group: the ultra-wealthy.

Why would the ultra-wealthy be this administration's in-group? Trump won voters with under 100K income, while Harris won those over 100K.[0] Among high-net-worth individuals, Harris had a 10 point lead among those with $1-5mm in net worth and a ~2 point lead with those >$5m, according to the only polling I could find that specifically targeted high-net-worth individuals.[1] It's possible that the "ultra-wealthy" buck this trend, but I haven't seen any data that suggest such a thing.

[0] https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024

[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

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

#398

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

vkou wrote: post #369
rtkwe wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how accurate you think the >$100 million estimated impact from the lower court is. When the FTC did the analysis they came up with a lower impact so they didn't have to do it. I'd be more willing to believe they got it right than a single judge did.

Why would this have any economic impact? These dark patterns don't generate any net value, they just move money from one pocket to another. The money will be spent somewhere else, instead.

Compliance and enforcement costs

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

#399

Post by marricks »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #346

From the article >"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission's rulemaking process are fatal here," As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what sounds good. >The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis wh…

It’s a pro business anti consumer supreme court which knows it’d be dangerous to appear that way. Government and court will hamstring their ability to help consumers.

My favorite comment on HN was some law student saying his prof said “Scalia is the most complicated supreme court member whose views are always unpredictable” and the commenter said “he’s just a corporate hack who always votes for corporations and backs it up” and sure enough he guessed every ruling correctly.

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