431–440 of 599 posts
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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.
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> 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.
Ruling on technicalities is their job. I don't like the outcome either, but they did their job and they did it well.
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> The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the law? I hope you don't get accidentally deported to a foreign prison by those lofty conservatives who are SO concerned with following the letter of the law. But yeah, when a far right court digs up a technicality that just happens to serve the corporate interests that line the pockets of those who appointed these judges well... that's the justice you must t…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism I do not defend conservatives when they don't follow the letter of the law. Except perhaps in cases where the law itself is unjust - however that is not your argument here so we can ignore that. There have also been cases where I didn't understand the full law and so have had to change my mind once I realized what I'm missing - but that doesn't seem to be the case here eithe…
But I love the IDEA of then justice system you're pretending exists.
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
Had you truly preferred not being informed, not being allowed to opt-out?
I'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.
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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 deliveri…
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…
I don't buy that argument. The issue is companies deliberately built complexity on top of their existing systems to make it harder to cancel. The added complexity that costs a lot of money to fix is a result of their unfair and deceptive practices. An enormous amount of deadweight loss would be returned to the economy if they simply implemented a much simpler design of click to cancel and avoided the unfair and decep…
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I don't buy that argument. The issue is companies deliberately built complexity on top of their existing systems to make it harder to cancel. The added complexity that costs a lot of money to fix is a result of their unfair and deceptive practices. An enormous amount of deadweight loss would be returned to the economy if they simply implemented a much simpler design of click to cancel and avoided the unfair and decep…
Isn't the argument that making it easier to cancel subscriptions means that more customers will cancel and the cumulative effect across the industry will be much more than $100M?
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It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US. However they have never seen any point - they mostly (not entirely) agree with the US and so it would be a waste of their limited time to do that instead of what they were doing instead.
> It was also the result of Europe (now the EU) choosing not to oppose the US (at least mostly - they did in small areas). The EU has more people and combined could - if they wanted - be more powerful than the US. Europe was destroyed by war, and then occupied by the US and USSR. The US liberated Western Europe and backstopped their independence. The Europeans didn’t choose to be on the American side, they were force…
Europeans choose to follow the US. Even recently Sweden joined NATO. If they wanted to develop their own inter-European military alliance, they could have done so but instead joined and alliance where the US calls the shots.
Also since the fall of the Soviet union, the European countries decided to basically gut their military budgets and redirect the money to other things, as seen by the fact that until very recently only a small fraction of the NATO countries actually met their 2% military budget targets.
De Gaulle after the war did not want to join NATO because he understood what that meant, alas his successors all be gave up on the concept of military independence.
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$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US. But it also seems ridiculous to skip since four people doing nothing but having a discussion about a new rule for 30 minutes across a good portion of those businesses is easily $100mil w/o them even having to lift a pinky besides.
>$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US. A minute of internet research suggests that specific $100m figure is from a 45-year-old law[1]. I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. That equivalent value today is almost $400m. EDIT: Actually th…