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FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

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Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#591

Post by listenallyall »

calmbonsai wrote: post #562
breadwinner wrote: post #140

This shouldn't be controversial. FTC isn't banning these fees, it is only requiring merchants to disclose the fees. Why would anyone be against that? Another good rule is click-to-cancel. Just a couple of days ago I logged into my Dish Network account to cancel it (after they hiked prices). There is no way to cancel online. There is no way to cancel via chat. You have to call. As soon as you call you're told the wait…

Agreed. With any such service, I budget 1 hour. If I can't get cancellation within that time-frame I have a standard form letter that gets sent out. Once the letter is sent, after the current billing cycle ends any additional charges from said service are disputed (either on the card or on bank account) as fraud. On three occasions, I've been asked to provide proof of fraud. I've emailed a scan of the cancellation le…

Honestly, if it works, why not send the letter first and not waste an hour on the phone?

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#592

Post by lxgr »

mulmen wrote: post #585
lxgr wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How should volume discounts, coupons, and shipping incentives be handled? I don't care, to be honest. If the merchant knows I can definitely get the cheaper rate without jumping through extra hoops, I don't see a problem in showing the lower price. > What about a grocery store on the Oregon/Idaho border? Idaho charges sales tax to residents but that can be waived with an Oregon ID. Should this be reflected in the a…

> I don't care, to be honest. If the merchant knows I can definitely get the cheaper rate without jumping through extra hoops, I don't see a problem in showing the lower price. But that discount is contingent on what you might add to your cart in the future and the shipping options you choose. Items can have complex interactions when purchased together. This isn’t just tax. It’s shipping, discounts, gift wrap, and co…

> This isn’t just tax. It’s shipping, discounts, gift wrap, and coupons. All of which are taxed and possibly at different rates. You have the luxury of not caring. The merchant doesn’t.

But that's already the case today. I see the price per item, not counting any potential bulk rebates or optional coupon codes, as it's not a priori clear what else I'll buy. On the other hand, sales tax can always be calculated per item sold, as far as I know.

> Say my city votes to provide free residential broadband to residents and fund it with a telco tax on private ISP service.

> “Simplifying” the tax code by just not allowing the city to do that is literally antithetical to our society. It’s an undermining of the laboratory of democracy.

That argument does make some sense to me, but there are many other types of taxes cities and states could levy other than sales tax, which is extraordinarily complicated as you've demonstrated.

> Our complex tax codes are not a conspiracy to create jobs in tax prep. [...] Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.

I agree, but also given the incentives here, I'd be surprised if that industry wouldn't put up heavy opposition if anybody seriously campaigned to simplify sales tax while avoiding the reduced autonomy/decentralization you mention. I'm all for avoiding Chesterton's Fence, but taking that way of thinking too far can cement the status quo beyond what's useful and resonable in many cases.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#593

Post by 1shooner »

rietta wrote: post #512
michaelmrose wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What abuses

I am not a legal scholar, but from my understanding enough that serious cases were filed and fought and made in all the way to the Supreme Court. In a https://www.scotusblog.com article, Amy Howe quotes the Chief Justice as saying "Chevron deference, Roberts explained in his opinion for the court on Friday, is inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that sets out the procedures that federal…

In terms of 'applying their own judgement' I wonder if this would take the form of agencies still pursuing their normal course of regulation, but courts having the option but not the obligation to defer to that regulation as an expert reference, at which point they are essentially reifying the regulation into case law. I wonder if you'd even get cases designed to lead judges to rule for a regulatory agency's interpretation to get the regulation more firmly established.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#594

Post by mulmen »

lxgr wrote: post #592
mulmen wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't care, to be honest. If the merchant knows I can definitely get the cheaper rate without jumping through extra hoops, I don't see a problem in showing the lower price. But that discount is contingent on what you might add to your cart in the future and the shipping options you choose. Items can have complex interactions when purchased together. This isn’t just tax. It’s shipping, discounts, gift wrap, and co…

> This isn’t just tax. It’s shipping, discounts, gift wrap, and coupons. All of which are taxed and possibly at different rates. You have the luxury of not caring. The merchant doesn’t. But that's already the case today. I see the price per item, not counting any potential bulk rebates or optional coupon codes, as it's not a priori clear what else I'll buy. On the other hand, sales tax can always be calculated per it…

> But that's already the case today. I see the price per item, not counting any potential bulk rebates or optional coupon codes, as it's not a priori clear what else I'll buy. On the other hand, sales tax can always be calculated per item sold, as far as I know.

That’s fair. I guess I just don’t see the value in displaying the per-item tax when there’s still a bunch of other unknowable charges. But I agree, as far as I understand it would be possible to show the per-item price with sales tax.

But my experience with tax is that it’s always more complicated than you expect, even when you think it’s more complicated than you expect.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#595

Post by zeagle »

mrguyorama wrote: post #540
paulryanrogers wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Class action suits may be easier, if only arbitration was opt-in-by-default or easier to opt out of.

Class action is an utter joke that has done nothing more than FURTHER commodify harming consumers for a price. If a company sends you a $2 check ten years after they recognize a profit from defrauding you or lying to you or harming you, that's not a punishment, and is certainly not an incentive to not do those things.

In practice they serve to enrich lawyers and that’s about it.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#596

Post by 15155 »

breadwinner wrote: post #140

This shouldn't be controversial. FTC isn't banning these fees, it is only requiring merchants to disclose the fees. Why would anyone be against that? Another good rule is click-to-cancel. Just a couple of days ago I logged into my Dish Network account to cancel it (after they hiked prices). There is no way to cancel online. There is no way to cancel via chat. You have to call. As soon as you call you're told the wait…

Call once, fail.

Chargeback: "attempted to cancel via phone."

Done.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#597

Post by 15155 »

lxgr wrote: post #528
lern_too_spel wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even simpler, file a dispute with your card issuer. Dish will pay the chargeback fee and block you as a customer, but I'm sure you don't want to be their customer again, so that's not a problem.

What dispute reason would you give? Usually card issuers will ask you if you've made any attempt to settle the situation with the merchant. If you misrepresent that you have and they are just ignoring you, you might practically get away with it, but do know that that kind of misrepresentation might get you into trouble some day. If however the merchant is actually unreachable for a bona fide cancellation request, tha…

> Usually card issuers will ask you if you've made any attempt to settle the situation with the merchant.

"I attempted to reach them via phone on or about _____, ___. No remedy was achieved."

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#598

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

mrguyorama wrote: post #547
danaris wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you...actually read what they wrote there? The (hypothetical) airfare was listed as "free", but it was impossible to end up paying less than $1200 for it. The point being that even if you have a choice between several fees (making none of them "mandatory" by a narrow reading), you're still paying something beyond the advertised base price. The logical good-faith rule in a case like this would be that you must adv…

The ACTUAL solution to these problems that HN always seems to be allergic to (because technicians prefer technical solutions, but humans aren't technical) is to make your court system extremely hostile to "clever" bullshit like this. This insistence at having EXACT WORDS for things that aren't exact is just naivety, thinking the world is can be divided perfectly into categories if we just make the categories specific…

Excellent point. In the end the rules are simply words on paper, they must be enforced. So the exact verbiage is less important. But the lack of ambiguity is extremely important. I'll give an example:

- In the EU, what can legally be defined as a "sale" price (e.g. 20% off till Friday! deals) uses very precise verbiage that states an item must be at a certain percentage higher for a specific period of time (typically 30 days) to constitute a sale.

- In the USA, the regulations basically say that companies should make a good faith effort to not deceive consumers with sale prices. It leaves defining what a good faith effort is as an exercise to the reader (states).

The end result is that you have a lot more misleading price info in the States, since all manner of questionably legal manipulation tactics are used and enforcement of this is lax.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#599

Post by zerocrates »

themaninthedark wrote: post #524
michaelmrose wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What abuses

Well, if you look at the case that was in front of the court when they overturned Chevron: The National Marine Fishery Service decided that since the Magnuson–Stevens Act allows for them to place monitors on fishing vessels in order to prevent the over-fishing of certain species but since their budget was lower and they couldn't actually afford to pay the monitors they decided that each ship would have to pay for the…

The thing about Chevron deference is, it was already limited on its face: it only operated at all in places where the statute is silent or ambiguous, and only commanded deference to "reasonable" interpretations.

If the interpretation in Loper Bright was not "reasonable," the Supreme Court already had the tools it needed to reverse the agency without breaking any precedent. If on the other hand it was reasonable, why should the courts be getting involved?

Removing Chevron simply allows the courts to select their preferred policy outcomes more directly.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#600

Post by zerocrates »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #393
LorenPechtel wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine guns? The ATF is simply going on function rather than form. It shoots like a machine gun it is a machine gun no matter what you call it. That being said, bump stocks are a simple enough concept that banning them is stupid. We should quite our obsession over machine guns--there are few situations where it even matters. The problem with it going through congress is that it will always be political rather than s…

> The ATF is simply going on function rather than form. It shoots like a machine gun it is a machine gun no matter what you call it. The part where it breaks down is pointing at a specific piece that enables automatic fire and calling that piece a "machine gun", even if it's just a tiny piece of metal or a specially-tied shoelace.

Though that's not what the Supreme Court actually held when tossing the bump stock ban: they instead said that a gun equipped with a bump stock isn't a machine gun and that's why the ban was invalid.

The case entirely hinged on the definition of machinegun being a gun that fires more than one shot "by a single function of the trigger" with the majority saying that because you need to keep forward pressure to keep firing, bump stocks don't count.

The aspect of bump stocks being just a part and not a gun wasn't important to the case because the statute is clear on this point: any part that's intended to convert a regular gun to a machine gun is itself a machine gun under the relevant law.

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