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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

#681

Post by EdwardDiego »

ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #499
fsckboy wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free market: and ideological stance where markets are without government intervention no, markets without government intervention are called "laissez-faire" markets. There would be no need for that term if that's what free market meant.

> There would be no need for that term if that's what free market meant. I'm not following here: are you suggesting that given any two different words, it is impossible for them to refer to the same thing or mean the same thing?

Free market is an evolution of the concept laissez-faire market after early economists realised that leaving market participants to do their own thing didn't ensure a competitive market.

There'd always been a belief in early capitalists that an unregulated market would be inherently self-regulating from competition, in a way that allowed for competition, and yeah, well, I would emphasise the word "belief" in that.

I once met a theologian who had done their PhD on the language used by a politically powerful neoliberal group in their writings on the market and came to the conclusion that it was primarily the language of faith, not the language of science.

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

#682

Post by throw10920 »

BadHumans wrote: post #283
throw10920 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A certain portion of the population is pro-profit at virtually any cost. What percent? (Citation needed if it's anything greater than 1%) What does "virtually" mean? This statement has no details and just comes across as political dogwhistling as a result.

Do you expect there to have been studies done on what percentage of the population puts profit over everything else? > What does "virtually" mean? virtually /vûr′choo͞-ə-lē/ adverb Almost but not quite; nearly.

> Do you expect there to have been studies done on what percentage of the population puts profit over everything else?

I expect people to not make claims without evidence. I never asked for a study, either - that's you misreading my comment. I asked for a citation, which could be a public poll - some empirical evidence, as opposed to none.

> virtually /vûr′choo͞-ə-lē/ adverb Almost but not quite; nearly.

This is an intentional misinterpretation of my question, as well as being sarcastic to mock and emotionally attack me. Any reasonable reader would have known that I meant "what value does virtually mean here?"

You're intentionally being deceptive and emotionally manipulative to push a political agenda. Don't do that.

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

#683

Post by LoganDark »

breadwinner wrote: post #154
LoganDark wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My preferred way to cancel these types of services is to close or pause the card they're charging. If you use a virtual card service like Privacy.com, this is easy, if you don't, then maybe not so much. But using virtual cards for everything you can is typically a good idea anyway, imo.

But then that becomes unpaid bills and they send you to collections.

Since when? I've never used a subscription before that doesn't just cancel when my card fails to debit.

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

#684

Post by AnthonyMouse »

account42 wrote: post #663
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have a sign up form it doesn't matter if they list the husband's name or the wife's name because either one is valid to sign up. If you have a cancel form it does matter, because it has to match the one used to sign up or they don't know who you are, even if the customer doesn't remember which one they used. Or any number of other issues with matching the request to a subscription. Humans can sort this out, bu…

Ah yes, let's allow businesses to employ dark patterns to profit at the expens of unwilling customers because otherwise they might need to put in a little effort to deal with hypothetical edge cases.

The businesses using dark patterns are disproportionately large corporations. The ones that have trouble implementing a regulation which is airtight against corporate lawyer tricks are the small ones. That implies the obvious solution that you make the rules specific to the large corporations, e.g. ones with more than 1000 employees. But the rules typically aren't written to do that, and as long as that continues you're going to get resistance from the very large number of small businesses you're screwing.

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

#685

Post by xp84 »

modriano wrote: post #586
potato3732842 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is a move afoot to eliminate all regulations unless they've been specifically passed by Congress. Which is basically incapable of passing anything. It's hard to argue with this in principal. The rules as law BS has been a band-aid over dysfunction. It needs to go. It'll hurt in the short term but should be more sustainable in the long term. That people will get more angry at congress for doing nothing is icing…

> It's hard to argue with this in principal. The rules as law BS has been a band-aid over dysfunction. It needs to go. It's very easy to argue with this in principle. Congress can't be constantly updating every law as new technology or situations emerge. It's much better for laws to set general goals and leave implementation to agencies staffed with experts.

Spoken like someone who trusts “experts” pretty completely.

If you are left-leaning, suppose the “experts” are former oil company lobbyists.

If you are right-leaning, suppose the “experts” are Marxists hired by President AOC.

That is why the “trust the unelected experts” idea fundamentally bothers people.

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

#686

Post by smsm42 »

This is still not addressing the main problem. Why can they add those fees and make their UX annoying and hostile to the customer, without fearing that the customers would just turn around and leave? Because the customers largely have nowhere to leave to. If you want to book a hotel, you have very small number of providers (most are owned by one of the very small number of giant conglomerates) to choose from, if you want a concert ticket, you probably have one single provider to choose from, and this is the situation in many other areas. Of course, absent competition, market mechanisms can't work. There should be a way to enable them to work again, and this is not being addressed.

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

#687

Post by smsm42 »

maximusdrex wrote: post #371
jimmaswell wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a move afoot to eliminate all regulations unless they've been specifically passed by Congress. Which is basically incapable of passing anything. (At least some of) the agencies brought this on themselves with their abuse of the goodwill/benefit of the doubt previously afforded to them. Most flagrant has been the ATF, for one example constantly redefining machine guns or pistol braces, turning millions of c…

Your understanding is not correct. Chevron deference never meant agencies can just make up and pass law; it was a legal doctrine which merely stated that in places where the law is ambiguous (say a law declares water must be clean of pollutants, or bans pistol braces) that courts should look at any guidance from relevant agencies for guidance, since supposedly they should know more about the subject than the courts.…

The problem with this is once this has been established, the Congress started being lazy and just throw the lawmaking to the bureaucrats, essentially saying "well. we make this agency and they will figure out the rules, we don't care, whatever". And this makes the law completely unaccessible to the regular citizen and the people being completely unable to influence which laws they are living by. While you can, with great effort, dislodge a bad congressman, there's practically no way for a regular citizen to affect anything within a bureaucratic regulatory agency and they are essentially in charge of lawmaking now. They can pass any law they want - and before SCOTUS intervention, Chevron ensured that you have no recourse at all against them, since the courts (by itself a hugely expensive and prohibitively complex process) will just tell you "the Congress passed the authority to the bureaucrats, so they can do whatever they like, we're not intervening". This is not a good balance of powers and not a good way to manage the affairs in the country.

> given that judges likely have even less knowledge of the subject than the ATF, probably worse and more inconsistent.

In the unicorn rainbow world where the regulatory agencies are omniscient saints only worrying about the common good, that may be an argument. In the real world, where the regulators are extremely politicized, extremely concerned with gaining more power and extremely happy to pass completely absurd and harmful regulations if it fits their particular agenda, it's not. And by now we all know this is the world we are living in.

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

#688

Post by idopmstuff »

jjeaff wrote: post #650
idopmstuff wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, not disputing that, just saying that I think she uses that enforcement mechanism in a way that is more harmful than helpful to American consumers and the to the economy.

She also blocked the huge grocery conglomerate merger. I don't think most of their cases were of tiny acquisitions.

True, but even on the big ones, she blocked Spirit/JetBlue. Now Spirit's declared bankruptcy. She spent a bunch of taxpayer dollars to block a merger and made the American consumer worse off as a result.

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

#689

Post by smsm42 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #334
hiatus wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now likely hundreds (or more) of individuals have to not only wait on hold forever, but have to learn the process of and actually go through with filing a small claim? That there is recourse is beside the point when it is mired in bureaucracy (not to mention taking days off to show up to court, etc).

I'm surprised I haven't yet heard of companies who would handle this for you, like there are e.g. for handling the process of getting compensation when an airline screws up scheduling or loses baggage, etc. I'm guessing there isn't enough money to be won there for them to be able to survive off a percentage of it.

I used such a company for airline compensation once. Took them 2 years to drag the process around and at the end I got nothing.

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

#690

Post by jtmb »

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…

Some people in a general sense just defend companies fleecing us for money because if it was the government who stopped it that makes it bad, which is, imo, very silly.
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