The problem is that if the courts only follow the rule of law some of the time then one must consider the possibility that these selective applications of the law are in service of some extra-legal agenda, in which case the fact that this agenda occasionally aligns with the law doesn't change the fact that the judges are in fact operating with compete disregard for the law except as it occasionally offers the opportunity to cover up their real motives.

> Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong

I think the tense of this sentence is not quite right. Something more like "Make checks and balances strong again" would work.

There are always reasons on both sides of a case

so, small questionable wins for normal people would break the system while big, veeeeerrrrry questionable wins for some subset of the elite are OK?

Seems that the hard coded fixed dollar amount argument can apply everywhere, see small claims court maximums.

No they don't. I'm not sure where they got that number from, but it's either wrong or being misrepresented (costs of entire infrastructure project confused with cost of lights). $10M is off by 1-3 orders of magnitude, depending on if you're counting installation of just one signal or a complete intersection.

It's conceivable for the installation of traffic lights in a remote place to be an expensive project if there's no power available there, but that's a much larger project than just a single traffic light.

maybe that includes the software and hardware to run the stoplight, the salaries of the operators and maintenance etc and their admin staff, and the all the analysis to figure out when it should be red/green, all that stuff.

No, it absolutely does not.

YEAH!

NO PART OF THE GOVT SHOULD EVER VIOLATE THE LAW!

YOU TELL 'EM, BUDDY!

Why would anyone be concerned with the industry vs the economy? Especially when it’s an industry engaged in foul play?

Any dollar “lost” as a result of customers being able to cancel results in customers gaining more money to empower industries that are actually productive.

No, I think that the $100M number comes from the cost of implementing the change, not the impact to the impacted companies' bottom line.

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.

The main reason I think the court got it right is that with ~33 million businesses in the US you could argue that sending every business an email would cost them >$100 mil in just labor cost if they forward it a few times and several employees spend a reasonable amount of time reading it.

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.

Why does it matter? As far as I can tell () the law asks the FTC to do an estimate, they did, and now the argument was ‘some one else thinks it’s wrong’. But does the law require an actual estimate?

If they are worried about this… either mandate some third party do the estimate, or mandate the study. This is just confusing.

() - of course I haven’t read the actual law or ruling yet…

Why would this have any economic impact? These dark patterns don't generate any net value, they just move money from one pocket to another. The money will be spent somewhere else, instead.

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Sure, but that's a different argument. OP wasn't carrying water for the companies that would be affected by this change, they were carrying water for the rule of law. If the FTC had sued saying that the $100M limit was too restricting and had no valid basis, then sure, this would be a valid argument. But the judges have to rule on the law as it's written, not as HN commenters would like it to be. Is the law wrong? Corrupt? Maybe! But that's a different conversation.

Believe me, I'm incredibly disappointed that this didn't work. I paid a Planet Fitness membership for a year after I had moved to a place too far away from any PF location to reasonably use it, just because the cancellation process was so convoluted that it took me ages to figure out how to cancel. I think that companies should be held liable when they employ predatory business practices like this. I agree with your premise, that the limit is too low and there's nothing to stop companies from lying about the cost to implement the rule. But the law is the law is the law is the law. Courts exist to interpret the law, and in this case, the law they were asked to interpret was whether the FTC had abided by the $100M cap. They found reasonable justification to rule that they had not.

Again, I get the desire to be up in arms over this. But recent events have shown just how fragile our legal system is when people decide that the rules can just be ignored, and I wish that people would be more hesitant to throw the baby out with the bathwater, even when doing so would mean I wouldn't have to pay planet fitness $20/mo for a year.

Tidy logical explanations of rule systems that click for people are very powerful when they come from authority. There’s a comfort in this sort of bureaucracy that appears to have taken broad considerations to protect us from complex dangers and second order effects.

Ruling on technicalities is their job. I don't like the outcome either, but they did their job and they did it well.

If we don’t want rulings based on technicalities, then don’t put technicalities into the law.

I don't know what you mean by "narrow" here. It sounds like you're saying that they did it at the last minute, and failed to finish. But you're saying that since the next administration would "surely" never do click to cancel, that somehow should immunize the FTC from following their own regulations? The next administration was elected.

The reason they have to do studies is so they can't rush things through. We don't want them to be able to rush things through. They're creating law.

> 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.

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The non-Federalist Society folks think that “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. How can right wing judges even compete with that?

I think we may have drastically different understandings of what “the law” is.

Trying to extrapolate the behavior of people with $100 billion from the behavior of people with $5 million is clearly nonsense. That's as big of a difference as between someone who makes $20 million per year and someone at the global extreme poverty line of $2.66 per day.

Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.

"this paper cut is exactly the same as sticking my arm in a wood chipper, which is why I chose the latter..."

“It’s like a uniparty bruh”

> You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.

It's not click to cancel, but... airlines will charge extra for the right to cancel with a refund. Cheapest ticket is non-refundable, higher priced in refundable. But these are finite resources - seats, dates/times, etc. Not infinite capacity SaaS platforms.

> You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry.

We can get pretty close. Take Adobe versus Affinity. Same industry, very similar product suites, but totally different pricing strategies, and Adobe makes cancellation much more annoying.

There are plenty of examples of this if you keep your eyes open. I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't have an exact example to give you is because I'm under NDA and I don't watch most consumer retail enough to know.

>Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.

Tacit collusion becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain in any market with more than a handful of players. A different pricing strategy is one of the easiest ways to counterposition against an incumbent there is. It's part of how SaaS toppled bubble wrap CDs in the first place.

That can be lower pricing with the same model, or it can be a one time purchase versus a subscription, or it can be a hard to cancel but very cheap subscription over a very expensive one time purchase.

> In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content.

People are more willing to pay $10 per month with ads than $12 per month without ads. I don't find that especially shocking. The market figures out what people actually want, not what people say they want.

Say it were not so. Then we would see some Netflix renegades start a new streaming platform that is Ad Free Again™ and only a tiny bit more expensive than the competitors, and most consumers would switch. It's not impossible, but I haven't seen that happen yet.

>You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option.

If I care enough about the feature and this price differential, I'll notice this and eventually go through the aggravation of cancelling to switch to a new, slightly higher priced service which does have click to cancel. I paid more for the easy cancellation promise and when it was revoked the service became less valuable to me. Whatever, it was fun while it lasted. A monthly subscription to Netflix is not a marriage, and it is not an investment.

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.

Then get legislation through congress to change it. The courts are not there to fix legislation unless it is superseded by other higher legal authorities. Such as the constitution national or state. Current legislation gives them corporations rights. If you think that is wrong then the way to change it is to get people elected who can change that legislation.

>People don't really use SMS in Europe, do they

Europe is very far from being a single entity. Yet, SMS/RCS is popular enough, and in many countries WhatsApp is non-existent.

I don't think I get any corporate communication from WhatsApp it is all SMS. For chatting WhatsApp is popular, but companies just send SMS.

Actually I am european and use sms a lot. Dont even have WhatsApp installed... :)

Everyone has SMS, they may also have WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or whatever is popular in any given market, but everyone has SMS.

thats not the point I was answering.

The point is that it's 2 sides of the coin under regulation vs over regulation. And no system is ideal on both sides of Atlantic

Plenty of well-meaning laws have unintended consequences. Intent does not absolve being the cause of the effect.

When we “overshot left” it was by electing a centrist cishet man who identified as Christian and had different colored skin from the prior presidents.

Overshooting right has us building concentration camps.

When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.

This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.

Surely you're joking, right? The current administration building concentration camps and cutting medicare for 12 millions people is just balancing... what? Obamacare? Don't be ridiculous.

I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.

The Asian Financial Crisis in 1997: deregulated capital flows allowed speculators to rapidly pull money out of countries like Thailand, causing their currencies to collapse. The IMF stepped in, but their 'rescue' packages demanded strict conditions- forced privatization, and further deregulation, which often made things worse. And let's not forget Black Wednesday, when speculators broke the Bank of England. This was called "a textbook case of a speculative attack enabled by capital mobility" which is a core neoliberal policy. Just like all politics: never trust the meaning or identity of something derived from it's headline, title, name, or label- those are always the first lies we are told.

"Neoliberal" means free markets. Most US conservatives insisted on free markets from 1980 until 2016. They claimed it would benefit the overall US economy (and maybe it has). They claimed those benefits would be shared by all Americans (which listen to them now).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

The FTC have no say in choosing to exist or not exist, or what laws are passed that they are supposed to enforce. In some cases, an agency intentionally choosing to not carry out their duties would even be breaking the law and subject to penalty or punishment. How the FTC goes about interpreting their duties and then the court system correcting their behavior when they disagree or misbehave is the system working as intended. If they don't have laws to interpret for an issue though, that's a legislative problem.

The real question is why isn't congress doing their job? They control both the existence and funding of the FTC and additionally the laws the FTC are tasked with interpreting and enforcing. If congress is unfit for purpose they should be replaced.

Even if we were to accept your premise (if broken, throw out), it's still Congress that decides whether the FTC exists or not.

The ftc isn’t supposed to create laws though. I tend to overshoot on the consumer’s side, but the ftc is overstepping with actions like this. There should be a law passed on this point and then ftc can enforce. Or ftc can sue based on existing law and let courts buy their interpretation.

Any examples of American company having worse customer experience than European ones?

I will give you 2 for the opposite: Amazon and Apple do no question asked refunds all the time. Much higher bar than European regulators require.

This is everywhere in Europe

So it is sometimes better to buy stuff online, because the reasoning is that you haven't seen or tried them, but when you buy it in a physical shop, then you were aware what you bough and can't claim that you couldn't check the colour of a thing or how it fit you or whatever else reason you can think of.

Care to expand beyond a meaningless statement? What has your experience been?

That service doesn’t exist in Europe unfortunately, I have to use Revolut for that

doesn't stop it from being sent to collections.

wtf are ppl downvoting this. i had it happen to me.

zombie purchasers is the business model of basically every gym. they lose money on the people that actually show up. the money makers are the people who sign up for a membership, go once or twice and then forget to cancel (or purchased a full year at once)

The fact that it takes more than 24 hours to put a 1 click cancel button is alien to me.

Why are you pasting the article when it doesn't include any warnings that were given to the ftc at the time?

Ah so a Trump appointee and 2 judges appointed by Trump. Now that's a group I would never trust to follow the law.

That commissioner also hated the fact that consumers were going to stop being robbed by big corps.

But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do given that now it won't be done.

Right, if they were screwing over customers, we’d call it disruption and give them a medal, if not $1 billion dollars. Since they’re trying to help people, we wag our fingers at them.

Almost never.

Whistleblowers are almost always revealing information that they are legally prevented from revealing, otherwise you wouldn’t need a whistleblower. A simple FOIA request would suffice.

Kinda, but corruption in my favor is unlikely to see me complain about it.

What if the “required procedures” are held in place by corruption?

It's an authorized recurring charge. Disabling the card only really works for sure on new charges. The only 'real' way to deauthorize it is to convince the merchant to do it for you. Every other method is just creating enough friction that you hope it will be too expensive for the merchant to fight back.

revolut and others still try to charge you, even if you cancel the VIRTUAL card. when you ask them, why and how they you do that, they say you have some sort of agreement for the subs. service and you need to end it on your own via them. Bank can't do that?? they said something like that to me. So they literally support the dark pattent side, not on your side obv.

The bar should be where changes happen to move in the correct direction easily, while moving in the incorrect direction harder. If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens, because the "potential gains" of doing so would be enormous.

I think we should absolutely lower this particular bar.

When bad actors have a low bar but good actors have a high bar, the country is bound to collapse. Look at how many rules the current regime is flouting. But the other side has to dot every i for some reason.

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 understand the question more, thank you for your comment

Illumina, Tapestry, Kroger, Lockheed Martin would disagree.

Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?

There is a new FTC administration.

I interpret this as being the incoming FTC wanted to kill this but not withdrawal (due to bad optics).

They wanted to lose the case and did so by changing a judgment they controlled so that the rule could fail a legal procedural challenge.

This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.

The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.

It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.

Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.

Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.

The issue is that many folks rely on and even manufacture financial illiteracy as part of their "business"

It's extremely easy to give people what they want: a quick way to cancel a subscription. It should be criminal to deliberately hide that action behind phone calls etc.

> You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial

Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.

I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.

Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.

The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.

When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.

Adobe is an example where a yearly discounted subscription is billed monthly

Cell phone plans often charge monthly but can be years long contracts.

> If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.

Let them. I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.

That is false. The conservatives have made it clear that they support the rule, but it needs to be done right. The real question is why are liberals willing to ignore the law?

WaPo was easy when I canceled last November. The lost time I canceled a NYT subscription, it still required a phone call.

Most gyms are over subscribed - if everyone who has a membership actually went to the gym they wouldn't have enough space/equipment for everyone. They would need to raise their rates to afford more. That is those who have a membership but don't go to the gym are subsidizing those who do go to the gym.

The more expensive gyms are not this way. They will let you cancel easily. They will often out of good customer service pause your membership if you don't visit at all for a month. However they cost twice as much and often have worn out equipment that a much cheaper gym would have replaced. As such if you really visit a gym one that makes canceling is hard.

A trivial search will get you the court opinion itself <https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/25/07/243137P.pdf>, so regardless of how bad the news article is you should not be uninformed.

From the abstract:

    …the Commission failed to follow procedural requirements under § 22 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”), 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1)

A more detailed explanation:

    The Commission’s formal rulemaking authority is found in § 18 of the FTC
    Act. Section 18 authorizes the Commission to adopt “rules which define with
    specificity acts or practices which are unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or
    affecting commerce” within the meaning of § 5, as well as “requirements prescribed
    for the purpose of preventing such acts or practices.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(a)(1)(B)
    (emphasis added).
    
    …
    
    Besides the specificity and prevalence requirements, § 18 requires a number
    of procedural steps, some of which go beyond those required for APA notice-and-
    comment rulemaking. The FTC must first publish an “advance notice of proposed
    rulemaking” containing “a brief description of the area of inquiry under
    consideration, the objectives which the Commission seeks to achieve, and possible
    regulatory alternatives under consideration.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(b)(2)(A). Also
    required is a notice of proposed rulemaking “stating with particularity the text of the
    rule, including any alternatives, which the Commission proposes to promulgate, and
    the reason for the proposed rule.” Id. § 57a(b)(1)(A). Interested parties must be
    afforded the opportunity for “an informal hearing” and to “to submit written data,
    views, and arguments” on the proposed rule. Id. § 57a(b)(1)(B)-(C), (c).
    
    Congress further required the Commission to conduct regulatory analyses of
    proposed and final rules, or amendments to rules, at two stages of the rulemaking
    process. First, when the Commission publishes a notice of proposed rulemaking, it
    also must issue a “preliminary regulatory analysis” containing “a description of any
    reasonable alternatives to the proposed rule which may accomplish the stated
    objective of the rule” and for the proposed rule and each alternative, “a preliminary
    analysis of the projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other
    effects, and of the effectiveness of the proposed rule and each alternative in meeting
    the stated objectives of the proposed rule.” 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1)(B)-(C).
    
    Second, the Commission must issue a “final regulatory analysis” when it
    promulgates a final rule. 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(2). Similar to the preliminary
    regulatory analysis, the final regulatory analysis must include a description of
    alternatives considered by the Commission and an analysis of projected benefits and
    adverse economic and other effects. The Commission must also provide “an
    explanation of the reasons for the determination of the Commission that the final rule
    will attain its objectives” and a “summary of any significant issues raised by the
    comments submitted . . . in response to the preliminary regulatory analysis.” Id.
    § 57b-3(b)(2)(B)-(E). Importantly, the preliminary and final regulatory analysis
    requirements do not apply to “any amendment to a rule” unless the FTC estimates that
    the amendment “will have an annual effect on the national economy of $100,000,000
    or more.” Id. § 57b-3(a)(1)(A).

Notice all of the steps. “advance notice of proposed rulemaking”, “notice of proposed rulemaking”, “preliminary regulatory analysis”, “an informal hearing” plus the ability of concerned parties “to submit written data, views, and arguments” to the FTC, and a “final regulatory analysis”. The court draws our attention to the fact that the FTC never did either of the regulatory analysis steps, and points out that they are required.

The FTC had opted out of doing those analyses on the basis that the new rule would have an annual impact of less than a hundred million dollars. The court however notes that this is quite unlikely:

    Based on the FTC’s estimate that 106,000 entities currently offer
    negative option features and estimated average hourly rates for professionals such as
    lawyers, website developers, and data scientists whose services would be required by
    many businesses to comply with the new requirements, the ALJ observed that unless
    each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the
    lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates, the Rule’s compliance costs
    would exceed $100 million. Such an estimate was “clearly unrealistically low
    inasmuch as there are several new requirements proposed that would require changes
    in existing practices and/or disclosure forms.”

Thus the FTC erred when it skipped these steps. The remedy is to vacate:

    Section 18 of the FTC Act directs that a reviewing court “shall
    hold unlawful and set aside the rule” if it finds agency action to be “without
    observance of procedure required by law.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(e)(3); 5 U.S.C.
    § 706(2)(D). “The ordinary practice is to vacate unlawful agency action.” United
    Steel v. Mine Safety & Health Admin., 925 F.3d 1279, 1287 (D.C. Cir. 2019).

This doesn’t mean that the rule is unconstitutional, just that the FTC has to actually do things correctly. The court hasn’t ruled on the law itself because it is moot.

    The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC” or “Commission”) issues final amendments to the Commission’s trade regulation “Rule Concerning Use of Prenotification Negative Option Plans,” retitled the “Rule Concerning Recurring Subscriptions and Other Negative Option Programs” (“Rule,” “final Rule” or “Negative Option Rule”). The final Rule now applies to all negative option programs in any media, and, among other things, (1) prohibits misrepresentations of any material fact made while marketing using negative option features; (2) requires sellers to provide important information prior to obtaining consumers’ billing information and charging consumers; (3) requires sellers to obtain consumers’ unambiguously affirmative consent to the negative option feature prior to charging them; and (4) requires sellers to provide consumers with simple cancellation mechanisms to immediately halt all recurring charges.

You have 2 trump appointees and George hw bush appointee.

Were you expecting respectable and proper jurisprudence? I'm not any more.