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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

#471

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

hamilyon2 wrote: post #422
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

In general the better experience will command higher price, right. That is true, and by forcing same lowest level on everyone we are constructing artificial floor on how bad an experience can be. Or at least ensuring that bad experience is so profitable that the competitor is ready to even pay the fee for violations. Illegal markets operate in this territory. No consumer protection there, sorry. I started to understa…

Always happy to facilitate deeper understanding, even when I disagree with you. No problem!

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

#472

Post by niam »

Buttons840 wrote: post #462
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…

While the courts, supposedly, focus on what the law actually says, remember that Wickard v Filburn (1942) established that growing a plant on your own property for your own personal use is "interstate commerce". I don't know a lot about law, but I at least know that ruling on what the "actual law is" is selective, and usually selective in a way that is beneficial for the rich and powerful.

> ruling on what the "actual law is" is selective

US judges are not fact-checked and may rely on whatever selection of information presented in amicus briefs (as-filtered by 20-something year old law clerks trying their best) seems applicable.[1]

This seems relevant here because the mentioned figure seems to be "compliance costs" (cost to implement), not the cost on the bottom line of each org. It's very possible that that cost still exceeds $100,000,000, but it does leave more discretion in the hands of the judges than the GP would seem to imply, and more room for judges to listen to inflated estimates of cost.

Acknowledging that there's still something to be said about erring side of caution, but also that there's something to be said about what a ridiculous limit $100Mil is in 2025.

[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/supreme-court-errors-are-...

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

#473

Post by rayiner »

syntheticcdo wrote: post #331
rayiner wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we’re talking about what “ should be constitutional,” we’re no longer talking about “the law” but instead policy or philosophy. Regulating the “public health, welfare, and morals” is the prerogative of state legislatures. So the question is whether there is anything in the constitution that overrides that general power. Resort to “emanations from penumbras” is a concession that there isn’t. By the way, this isn’t…

I'm asking about your personal opinion: in Griswold v. Connecticut should the Supreme Court have upheld states right to ban access to all contraceptives, including condoms?

Your question asks whether I “believe such a restriction should be constitutional.” I’m obviously not in a place to decide what “should” or “should not” be in the constitution—the document is what it is.

If your question is whether I think the Griswold was correctly decided, the answer is obviously not. Regulating access to medications obviously falls within the police power of state governments, and I don’t think the constitution has a special carve out for particular types of medications. In fact I think this was an extraordinarily easy case as a legal matter, and the fact that the Supreme Court got it wrong demonstrates how intellectually sloppy a lot of mid-20th century precedent was.

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

#474

Post by magicalist »

cogman10 wrote: post #283
rayiner wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Courts don’t make decisions on whether executive rules are told or bad, serve consumers or not. The main oversight they have is ensuring compliance with procedural rules and statutory technicalities.

Yeah, I take a dim view of the courts in general these days. However, this looks black and white. The FTC was trying to rush in the change before Trump took office and that backfired on them. Now, the rule is good. There is no reason why the current FTC shouldn't implement it. It literally harms nobody except for businesses addicted to dark patterns.

> There is no reason why the current FTC shouldn't implement it. It literally harms nobody except for businesses addicted to dark patterns.

Well:

> The FTC issued the proposal in March 2023 and voted 3-2 to approve the rule in October 2024, with Republican Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson voting against it. Ferguson is now chairman of the FTC, which has consisted only of Republicans since Trump fired the two Democrats who remained after Khan's departure.

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

#475

Post by TheCoelacanth »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #470
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was an actual contract that you signed, then I might agree, but this is just clicking a button on a website. That type of "contract" should be sharply limited in what terms it can include.

It is generally an actual contract. When you sign up for a service like Netflix, you are agreeing to a legally binding document, outlined in a document commonly known as "Terms of Use" or "Terms of Service." To artificially limit this contract would be to impede freedom of trade, which generally leaves everyone worse off, not better.

Freedom to trick unsophisticated consumers with giant stacks of legalese is not a freedom worth preserving.

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

#476

Post by devjab »

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

The cookie banner pop-ups are not compliance with the EU legislation, in fact, many of them are in direct violation of EU laws. If you were to give sites the benefit of doubt, they are doing it because they are copy pasting, but the reality is, that the law is that they can not track you without your concent and that they are not allowed to bother you. The fact that they do is likely malicious compliance to get you to blame the EU rather than their shitty tracking practices.

Any site that doesn't have a single button click to ignore all cookies, breaks EU law. But to truly follow the law, you would have to go into a site setting on your own, and enable tracking. Which nobody would do.

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

#477

Post by TheJoeMan »

lozenge wrote: post #281
jdlshore wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not work on these sorts of systems. It can easily take more than 24 hours. In case you’re genuinely interested in learning more, here’s how it works. There are good reasons for it working this way, BTW. The needs of a company with hundreds or thousands of people are different than the needs of hobbyists and early-stage startups. 1. A user experience designer analyzes the user flow and decides where to put th…

We are assuming the calculation for the number of companies affected is correct. If they are using a provider like Shopify or a WordPress plugin, the cost will only be to upgrade the plugin. I don't know that the backend is necessarily needed. If the button only opened a support ticket/sent an email then the rest can be done by the employees who already processed cancellations on the phone. They just don't need to be…

Exactly, currently at some point on page 10 of click-throughs, is the "real" cancel button, and essentially you just need to make that the "first" cancel button and link straight to it.

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

#478

Post by pavon »

gmd63 wrote: post #429
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…

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…

That is a decent argument against the law requiring the analysis, but it is not a good argument that judges should let the FTC violate the law.

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

#479

Post by CWuestefeld »

jakeydus wrote: post #450
cortesoft wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the other person is right… the term is “economic impact” not “cost to implement”

That's what I thought too, but from the ruling in the article, it seemed like the justification came from calculating the cost to implement (emphasis on 'compliance costs'. > 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 business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest…

Well, the two are related. By definition, the economic impact must be at least as much as the cost to implement. So estimating the cost to implement sets a lower bound on the total economic impact.

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

#480

Post by tadfisher »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #437
gmd63 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, and I can make an argument that John's Window Breaking and Repair Services, LLC is performing a public good by stimulating economic activity.
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