401–410 of 599 posts
Spectrum (cable/telephone/internet) kept me on the phone line for 30 minutes as i tried to cancel.
Ask my girlfriend about my phone call with Time Warner (pre Spectrum) where I said the words "I want to cancel cable TV but keep internet" about two dozen times to 3 different people.
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.
People are served by knowing that, regardless of what the law says, it will be applied consistently. It's on the legislature to write new law if the old law is bad, not the judiciary.
I don't think people feel well served by knowing that bad laws will last forever. The civil service was supposed to be a non-partisan way to manage the country efficiently. It does not do me any good to say "No, you are stuck with the inefficient system, and you should feel good about that because at least it's written down."
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> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Sorry bro I had to
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.
True but generally speaking American companies usually have much better customer service and better refund policies than European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners the market or has no viable alternatives. So maybe the American way of doing things can also work if a healthy competitive environment is preserved. The problem lately is that American companies have become monopolies and the formula fir…
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To be honest I don't think they do "no question asked refunds" for the consumer's benefit -- probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return requests they get. I'm sure you'd soon find it's not quite a guaranteed "no questions asked" process if you repeatedly return large expensive items.
>probably more so that they don't have to devote customer support resources to handling all the return Sounds like a win-win then. This isn't zero sum. Just because it's better for the company doesn't mean it's worse for the consumer.
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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 acc…
I'm hardly going to do that research myself, so I have no opinion. There are legal bloggers whose opinions I'd respect. I assume comments on Hacker News are no more informed than my own, unless they show they have relevant expertise.
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…
I think you missed this — it isn’t some arbitrary reason to rule in an anti-consumer way. There is good reason to do so. Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong, and this is one small action that does that.
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If you actually bother to click through and read the article, you'd find the court expressed sympathies with the intent of the rule, but the FTC "is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more", and they did not do that. The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.
> you'd find the court expressed sympathies with the intent of the rule And you'd find such sentiments to be completely worthless, except insofar as they act as cover for a ruling on a technicality in favor of the same corporate interests that fund the politicians that appointed these judges.
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…
Maybe? But this wasn't the supreme court: "...was vacated by the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit."
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What's described here is really just legalized thievery with extra steps. "We make it difficult to stop paying us" versus "we charge extra for the privilege of not making it difficult to stop paying us" is just fraud versus extortion. That one or both may be technically legal is no excuse.
It's not legalized thievery to make it nonfree to exit a contract you voluntarily signed up for in the first place. That's ridiculous and hyperbolic. People do it all the time, at all levels of scale and severity. You might as well take issue with the US government not having a "click to cancel" option on NATO or something.
This isn't about cancellation fees, a fixed-term commitment, or anything of the sort. It's agreeing that "you can cancel by filling out the form" without mentioning that to get the form you need to climb down into an unlit basement, and find the form in a maze of unlabeled filing cabinets while evading the guard leopard.