Honestly, this is the best thing if it changes the worst experience I've had cancelling something - Gyms. They make it crazy easy to sign up, but a pain in the ass to stop being a member (for example, if you move and forget to cancel good luck - they want you to come in and talk to the manager in a lot of cases)
The gym I belong to requires both a credit card and bank routing and transfer numbers, on top of like 13 different legal documents. It is the only one I can afford within 10 minutes of my house.
Sometimes you can but you better be guaranteed you’ll be exposed to high pressure sales tactics that make it not worth it, similar to how timeshare presentations offer “free” stuff
Gyms largely make money from people having memberships but never actually going.
There's only a few types of gyms where most of the members actually use the gym, and although they're still subscription based, they have entirely different business models.
There are plenty of subscription based gyms that have high utilization and also make it easy to cancel. They’re just usually more expensive (e.g. $200 per month instead of $20 like 24 Hour Fitness).
I'm a regular at one of those pricy gyms, and I think you're spot on. There's high utilization, and the gym actually bugs you if you haven't shown up to class in a while. The high price probably leads to a degree of self-selection among members, and the class-centric nature of the gym (as opposed to just being a floor full of equipment) probably means there's business value to people being there.
A friend of mine worked in sales for a big national gym. Not understanding their business model, he proposed a program that would generate some excitement among the membership and bring many of them in daily to participate. It didn't get shot down, it just didn't get any interest at all. When I explained it his eyes went wide, like it was a new idea to him. This strategy doesn't seem to be widely shared even with their own sales force.
He left and is now working for a company that actually wants its customers to use its product more.
The gym needs to have a bar making and selling overpriced "health drinks", and also a store selling overpriced merchandise; then getting more people into the gym would actually be profitable.
I'm a rather happy customer of Planet Fitness and a regular user. It's pretty clear what their business plan is, but the gym itself is fine, obviously with no frills. The most obvious deficiency is that they only have smith machines and no barbells, but that's not much of an issue for me. The strangest aspect is that there are no scales in the locker room; I assume that's a purposeful part of the atmosphere. Still I recommend them to all my friends. If they don't go, I suppose they're still subsidizing my membership.
Most gyms I've been to do not allow local residents to purchase 1-day passes.
They do often allow people visiting (on business etc.) to purchase a daily or weekly pass. But may need your ID to prove that, and you can only do that so many times. Like if you visit for two weeks once a year they're happy to. If you come once a month for business, you're gonna need a full membership.
And you've always gotta sign stuff no matter what. For liability, so they know who to contact if you keel over on the treadmill, and so forth.
Depends on the gym. Some do not allow it at all unless you sign up for some type of membership - or they tell you to do a free trial, take your billing info, and hope you forget to cancel.
The alternative I've commonly seen is they do offer a day pass, but it's basically the cost of an entire month to go even one time, while also making it extremely inconvenient by having to sign a bunch of forms every single time you go. This makes it so nobody except maybe a tourist/non-local would ever consider this option.
They will just continue attempting to collect money as per the contract you signed, and then send you bill to collections when they can't.
Edit: Credit card companies typically require/ask you to dispute with the merchant and attempt to do get a refund first before they will chargeback. If you try, and the gym can point to contract, you'll lose the dispute either way. Getting your credit card number changed stops the gym from charging you, but you'll still owe them money and you'll typically find out when you start getting calls from a collections agency.
Gyms are notorious shysters who made it difficult to cancel your membership, even when you have the right. Don't blame the consumers for this bullshit. Do as many chargebacks as you can.
Don't sign an agreement to do something you don't want to do. It's as simple as that.
It's not "blaming the consumers" for expecting people to follow the terms of contracts they sign. I never had a Gold's Gym membership for exactly this reason - their cancellation terms were onerous, I wasn't interested in complying, so I never signed and never gave them any money.
If you say "well, I don't want to do that, but I'm just going to sign this anyway then do a chargeback because that's easier" them yes, you deserve to be blamed, you deserve to be shamed, and you should have to pay the cancellation fees, early termination fees, whatever.
Bullshit rules are bullshit rules, the fact that something is technically legal doesn't make it morally justifiable. The default assumption of any consumer in a high trust society is that they are going to receive a fair service for the price they pay.
A contract is only as good as both parties participate in good faith, or as it is enforceable.
I'm comfortable with taking on the risk of not fulfilling my end of something like a gym contract, provided the mechanism to remove third parties like payment processors.
Because a chargeback is for some sort of fraud, and as scummy as crap like this is, it usually doesn't count. It's not a universal "I want this charge to stop" tool. A human WILL review it, and you WILL get dinged, up to and including account termination, if you do it too much and too frivolously.
Some of the franchised gyms do this but in my experience local gyms often do not. At my local gym their memberships are for a "defined term" (3 months, 6 months, etc.) and if you don't renew, they end. I've never tried to end one early but knowing the owner and how he runs the place I am quite sure it would not be an issue.
You can also just pay as you go, i.e. per visit but that ends up being a lot more expensive.
You might be able to just beg. I had a frustrating experience with the YMCA a few years back with their cancellation flow requiring you to physically show up with a signed form and I called telling them I was trying to cancel because a spine injury made it impossible to work out and rather difficult and painful to even move, let alone travel to the YMCA, and they got a manager on the phone who canceled me after saying it was acceptable to take a photo of the signed form and e-mail it.
There's at least some hope of decency and empathy in an individual person empowered to override process prescription even if there will never be any in the dark patterns dreamed up by the corporate-level customer retention team.
Mental models are tricky. Some people believe there is a right to pull a fast one on others or make their life hard in the name of revenue or business.
As coldpie said:
> Remember this when you're going to vote. Elections matter.
Tbh I don't think it's _even_ anti-business; if people were more comfortable with subscriptions, which this should achieve, they would be more willing to enter into them. It's anti-bad-business, granted, but you'd probably expect it to if anything increase commerce in the long run.
Posted elsewhere in this thread but here is the reasoning why from Melissa Holyoak, who voted no. This rule goes further than just the cancellation mentioned in this article and there are some legitimate concerns with that. It is unclear but I think Melissa Holyoak would have voted yes if it was just the cancellation rule.
This is why you shouldn't let ChatGPT do your thinking for you. Skimming is an important art.
Her basic points are:
1. The FTC doesn't have the authority to make this rule, and in government there must be a hard line between "I want this" and "this is legal" unless you want a dictatorship.
2. The reason the FTC has so many Congressionally-enacted laws to follow is because of a history of overstepping its legal authority. The more they push the boundary, the less authority the FTC will have in the long-run.
3. The rule is too broad. Broad regulation is bad because it leaves too much legal wiggle-room for violators with deep pockets and smart lawyers. At the same time, small businesses who may be acting legitimately can't know they'll be accused of violating overly broad rules, or afford to defend themselves if they draw government scrutiny.
4. The FTC has a specific procedure it needs to follow for making a rule but they didn't follow that procedure.
5. Because of the above, the rule will be challenged by BigCo and struck down in court, wasting time and harming the FTC's reputation.
I'm hopeful about a "Click to Cancel" future (who wouldn't be?) but it's pretty hard to dismiss those points as "typical pro-business grift".
If someone were just attempting to maintain a "pro-business grift", wouldn't this be exactly the argument they'd make? That the FTC is, effectively, legally toothless?
I mean, making rules that will end up getting over turned in courts, setting a precedent is also exactly how you end up making institutions toothless (see, the recent supreme court decision that overturned Chevron). I'm totally for this type of regulation though, it's just that I don't think that their argument is bad at all.
I think this is just the form that "typical pro-business grift" takes these days. "This [entity] has no legal authority to do [obviously good thing]" is a favorite justification for obstructionists in power at every level of government to ensure nothing gets done. They seem to conveniently drop this position when the action in question is pro-business.
Sure, that is how it was designed. The reason it doesn't work that way anymore is because of a continuous parade of states violating Americans' rights, each one so egregious that people said "yeah, it was designed the way macinjosh describes, but boy it turns out a lot of these state 'cultures' or 'identities' are producing despicable outcomes for our fellow Americans, and we should step up to prevent those abuses."
In that case, why have a state government? Why not have everything determined county-by-county?
In fact, why have it be county rule? Why not just neighborhood by neighborhood?
You place the locus of control according to the problems you need to solve. Neighborhoods combine to cities combine to counties combine to states combine to countries in order to be competitive and thrive against the broader environment. Yes, it does typically entail a loss of autonomy, but the benefit is that your little independent enclave doesn't get taken over by the next-strongest neighbor.
Why vote at all? You don't care about the consent of the governed, we should just make you chairman of the federal government and have your enlightened rule bring us to a new era of prosperity!
I'm downvoting this comment chain because you're just throwing low effort critiques without addressing any of the big points. 1) why is tens of millions of people in a state enforcing the will of the majority on the others fine but hundreds of millions of people in the country enforcing the will of the majority on others "not caring about the consent of the governed" and "the reason democracies fail"? 2) why is it okay that people should have to vote on whether others can prey on them, exploit and abuse them? How is this one of the things you think is really important to speak out about?
In the context of this concrete discussion, allowing customers to cancel contracts they don't want - that's something which you object to because you want companies to be allowed to keep taking your money against your will, because consent matters to you? That is obviously self-inconsistent.
>why is tens of millions of people in a state enforcing the will of the majority on the others fine but hundreds of millions of people in the country enforcing the will of the majority on others "not caring about the consent of the governed" and "the reason democracies fail"?-
Because we aren't a unitary democracy, we are a federal republic that was built upon the idea of a limited federal government designed to address pressing national issues, with "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The will of the people state should almost always be superior to the will of the federal government. There needs to be an exceedingly pressing and relevant reason that any law, let alone one made by unelected bureaucrats, should overrule any of a state's laws. There is no exceedingly pressing reason the federal government should be involving itself in the process of canceling an auto renewing contract.
>"why is it okay that people should have to vote on whether others can prey on them, exploit and abuse them"
A company making it slightly annoying to leave an agreement with them is not being preyed on, exploited, or abused. That kind of language to describe "sitting on the phone longer than I want to cancel my paper subscription" or similar is bordering on histrionic.
>There needs to be an exceedingly pressing and relevant reason that any law, let alone one made by unelected bureaucrats, should overrule any of a state's laws.
Are you saying this because you believe it, or because the Constitution says so?
I think rote but beneficial consumer protections in the digital age is something that fits well at a national level. We don't need a 50-state laboratory on how to handle SiriusXM.
Oh, and making it artificially difficult for laypeople to get out of subscription contracts is absolutely predatory.
> "A company making it slightly annoying to leave an agreement with them is not being preyed on, exploited, or abused. That kind of language to describe "sitting on the phone longer than I want to cancel my paper subscription" or similar is bordering on histrionic."
This is replying to an objection about forests by saying "how could one object to a single leaf?". This other comment by someone else describes it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41875283
Company behaviour is sociopathic psychological manipulation. Having to legally force companies to let you leave - if that was a personal relationship that you couldn't leave without the government forcing your partner to let you out of it, it would be an abusive one.
Imagine attacking a law about making subscription cancellations easier by saying it degrades culture.
Really, of all the places to get worked up about the 10th amendment, a clear-cut, low-risk, low-intrusion expansion of consumer protection is a weird one.
> this is the actual faithful steelman argument for the people who vote against this.
My argument is different. There should not be any regulation except where existentially necessary (e.g. you need government to manage an army, because otherwise someone else will conquer the country, this sort of thing).
Sure, most rules sound good in isolation. But in aggregate you end up with huge administration and 50% marginal tax rate and massive regulatory burden to businesses. Not able to cancel a subscription easily after you willingly enter into a relationship with some business is too tiny an issue to merit expanding the government monster.
The US is the closest, but not close and it is getting further away. The lawless parts of the world you mention do not take care of the existentially necessary bits.
> do not take care of the existentially necessary bits.
That can't be true... people exist there. Turns out your heuristic is no more defensible than anyone else's: I want the government to provide precisely the services I want.
> Not able to cancel a subscription easily after you willingly enter into a relationship with some business is too tiny an issue to merit expanding the government monster.
So in your world, I have to protect my credit card details from all evil people in the world forever (and also somehow prevent them from acquiring companies that I've previously given my details to), because it's okay for a company to keep charging my credit card forever, even if I don't want or use the service.
This is pretty much an argument for legalizing theft.
In my world, you generate a single purpose card number for each subscription, or block the company at the bank level. My world is all about personal responsibility.
You would presumably notify the company about the cancellation, wouldn't you. Unprofessional not to do so. However the ability of a company to not accept cancellation sent by, say, email, is not possible without the government acting to enforce such restrictions.
I think the main reason to vote for the current administration is because of the actions taken by the FTC in the last four years. It isn't just this last month.
I would recommend reading the newsletter "Big" by Matt Stoller for context.
Lina Khan seems widely hated across the aisle, so that's a good first step.
The SEC has also taken unprecedented actions under Rohit Chopra.
Why of course they voted no? They could have voted yes… it’s popular. We’re supposed to be a nation governed by the people, which means the rules are supposed to be what is popular
The rulemaking process for this started 3 years ago. If the republican commissioners didn't want rules dropping so close to the election they could have supported changes to speed up the rulemaking process but they didn't. In fact, the dissent complains about how "rushed" the process was.
> It is also hardly one of the most pressing election issues.
Let's just send Lina Khan to Ukraine and get this problem squared away I guess
Ah yes, "we can't do anything before an election", despite it always being just before some election, and also it's totally okay when one party does it.
Not surprised that you're being downvoted despite telling the truth, because "politics is off-topic while technology is on-topic" (even though politics is often deeply intertwined with technology).
I've seen people argue for the most heinous shit here without so much as a slap on the wrist. HN isn't above politics, it's just above the _wrong_ politics.
Politics is deeply intertwined with everything, but simplistic summaries like "party lines! remember this!!1" are as much disinformation as anything else. I mean look at some of the comments in this subthread specifically along similar lines. Completely ignorant of (or more likely, willfully ignoring) the fact that there's more to this rule than just "make cancellations easy."
One of the people who voted against it explained why and it has nothing to do with wanting to make cancellations harder. But we can't acknowledge that truth because that goes against the "one side is good, one side is bad" narrative so many here try to push so often and so hard.
I'm not being downvoted, quite the opposite :) HN mods sometimes stick comments towards the bottom of a thread, probably when they feel it will invite flame wars. Not an unfair thing to do, tbh, I don't disagree with the policy. But I still think it's worth making the comment.
Sure, everything is political. But that's meaningless, and it just gets tiring to see the same debates over and over because someone said the thing "remember this when you vote". Like yeah, that's usually how voting works; you vote based on policies like this.
It would be similar to going into an israel-palestine war thread and saying that "remember, if you vote Biden you're voting for a president that is enabling a genocide" or saying that "those bombs were given by Biden's administration " whenever a hospital gets hit in that war. Is it true? Sure. Is it stirring the pot? Absolutely. Do people who vote for Biden already know that and don't really care? Almost certainly.
The exact same applies to comments like this. Like yes, republicans vote for Republican candidates knowing this. It's not like they weren't aware that the party they support leans heavily towards favoring business interests.
There's a lot of people who say stuff like "why bother to vote, both sides are the same." I think it's useful to highlight instances like this when there's a clear difference which impacts people directly.
Does the FTC actually have the power to set rules like this effectively now that Chevron deference isn't a thing? I'd imagine e.g. the New York Times, among others, will quickly sue to stop this, no?
As a Washington resident, I tested this a while back: nope, you can cancel online AFAICT (I didn’t actually cancel, but the click flow indicated that it should work), and do not need to be a CA resident.
I'm in Texas and was able to cancel online. It was slightly frictional. I had first paused my subscription. Apparently you can't cancel if your subscription is paused, so I had to reinstate the sub to cancel.
USA Today, then. They do not, and most local papers are run by them. They have a "Cancel" button, and when you click it, it says you have to call them, during business hours.
This won't be the case in California, but I've observed this in both Indiana and Texas. I haven't subscribed to the local paper here in NC, because I can tell at a glance that it's the same company and I've already had to dealt with their shenanigans twice.
There isn't a generic answer for this. You'd have to check the specific laws setting up what the FTC can do, which is more research than you can reasonably expect from an HN post, unless we get super lucky with some very, very specialized lawyer posting.
Chevron deference is about statutory interpretation so it really depends on the statue they are doing it under and any ambiguities that arise around the ability to do this. It may be clearly covered or it may not be, we would have to look. And if there are ambiguities it may go the way of the FTC, but since Chevron is gone, not automatically.
The rule wasn't adopted with unanimity and one of the FTC Commissioners (Melissa Holyoak) issued a dissenting statement that basically - with Chevron - will serve as a blueprint for contesting its adoption. [0] If the past is a guide to the future, it can be expected that the 5th Circuit will be the first out of the gate with a ruling.
Since Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), the judiciary does not need to defer to federal agencies when the statute is ambiguous. In fact, the judiciary can completely ignore the expertise of the federal agency and substitute their own. The overturning of Chevron deference enables the judiciary to first find that the FTC's authority for this rule is grounded in an ambiguous statute and then decide the FTC went beyond their authority.
While I wouldn't be totally surprised to see this argument, Commissioner Holyoak's dissenting statement doesn't raise it. Instead she purports 1) the FTC didn't properly follow the rule making requirements and 2) the rule is overbroad.
>In fact, the judiciary can completely ignore the expertise of the federal agency and substitute their own.
I don't believe this is accurate, as you stated
>The overturning of Chevron deference enables the judiciary to first find that the FTC's authority for this rule is grounded in an ambiguous statute and then decide the FTC went beyond their authority.
The only thing the SCOTUS can do is rule against the agency for exceeding its congressional authority. They aren't substituting their own expertise. Correct me if I'm wrong.
It doesn’t need to go to SCOTUS, Chevron deference was precedent for the lower courts, SCOUTS can always do whatever it wants.
The plain reading of Loper Bright is that the courts should make their own independent interpretation of the statutory provisions. In doing so the court can ignore the agency’s expertise.
> The only thing the SCOTUS can do is rule against the agency for exceeding its congressional authority.
That is what Roberts' conclusion wants it to sound like but he claims a lot more power for the courts than the statement implies.
> In an agency case as in any other, though, even if some judges might (or might not) consider the statute ambiguous, there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the court would have reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron, 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. It therefore makes no sense to speak of a “permissible” interpretation that is not the one the court, after applying all relevant interpretive tools, concludes is best. In the business of statutory interpretation, if it is not the best, it is not permissible.
In other words, the judiciary has final say on the "best reading" of a statute and all other readings definitionally exceed the authority granted by the statute.
> They aren't substituting their own expertise.
examples of Chevron questions that are now up to the judiciary to identify the "single, best meaning", independently of agency interpretation:
> the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological product[s],” including “protein[s].” When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a “protein”?
> What makes one population segment “distinct” from another? Must the Service treat the Washington State population of western gray squirrels as “distinct” because it is geographically separated from other western gray squirrels?
I find it exceptionally hard to imagine an answer to either of those questions that don't require a judge to exercise their own chemistry or biology expertise, however limited that may be.
The FTC has rule making authority but it will certainly be litigated.
My expectation is a case will quickly be brought in the Northern District of Texas, they'll rule it unlawful (following Commissioner Holyoak's lead), then it'll get bumped up to the 5th Circuit on appeal and they'll issue a stay.
I don't expect to see this rule take affect anytime soon, if ever.
We gotta stop giving SCOTUS credit for bad decisions when they make unpopular opinions. SCOTUS is not supposed to make legislation, and if they are going to try and override Chevron from the bench without legislation, then we have to ignore them.
SCOTUS' power/respect only goes as far as they're actually listening to the will of Americans. This is not representing Americans if they override. Same for abortion (just legality not anything about enforcement), same for presidential immunity.
We have expectations, and they do not align with SCOTUS, so SCOTUS is not a valid interpretive institution. "The Supreme Court has made their decision, let's see them enforce it."
This is insane and wrong. The Supreme Court is explicitly not supposed to represent the will of the people. You’re advocating nothing less than a type of coup.
And against my best judgement, I’ll add that in it was roe v wade itself that was essentially judges creating law (shoehorning abortion rights into a right to privacy is a stretch).
I don't disagree that disregarding the Supreme Court is essentially a type of coup. However, the power which is being contested here is a power that the Supreme Court invented for itself out of whole cloth: judicial review was born in 1803 when Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that an act of congress was unconstitutional. That's honestly a bigger coup than what is being suggested here, and is only perceived as legitimate because a) it's been around for a long time, and b) the Supreme Court has mostly backed down from its most unpopular opinions.
I'm advocating for a balance of powers. Which is why I'm quoting a precedented action by a president. Right now the SCOTUS is grabbing a lot of power for itself that has been delegated to the executive branch by congress in accordance with Chevron deference.
You call out yourself that the judges are essentially creating law. (presidential immunity and abortion both are just bonkers decisions based on thoughts and feelings). I think the only way to curb that from the supreme court is that the other governing body capable of action (see not congress) needs to remind SCOTUS that they've got finite power.
Do you have another alternative here? Maybe more ethics rules that SCOTUS doesn't have to follow? Wait for congress to impeach a sitting justice for corruption? Hopes and prayers?
Chevron deference wasn't created by Congress, it was created by SCOTUS to begin with. It was an interpretive rule that essentially said the courts should favor the interpretation of the executive branch over that of members of the public wanting to challenge it. Under both the previous and current rule, if Congress doesn't like the resulting interpretation they can pass a new bill.
The main difference is that now unelected judges decide how to interpret the law instead of unelected administrative officials. But that's what judges do.
What this is really about is that nobody wants to get blamed for what happens. So Congress passes purposely ambiguous laws and then deflects blame onto the courts for interpreting them one way or the other. The courts didn't like that so they said they'd defer to administrative agencies. It turns out the administrative agencies did like that, because they have almost no direct accountability and the only elected ticket in the executive branch has a term limit and frequently switches parties, so it was easy for them to participate in the revolving door and line their pockets.
Now the courts are going to go back to doing their job, so naturally now they get the blame for Congress passing ambiguous laws again, and the people profiting from the status quo are railing against it as if the courts are doing something wrong instead of doing what they ought to have been doing the whole time.
Yeah, but they could've overturned it if they didn't like it.
> The main difference is that now unelected judges decide how to interpret the law instead of unelected administrative officials. But that's what judges do.
This is a huge difference you kinda skip over. Should the policies and regulations of 100s of industries be decided by:
1. People who are only familiar with court proceedings
2. Experts in those industries with experience in those industries
One of those things is meaningfully worse, because we're going to get a ton of "armchair experts" on culture war issues who have no idea about what's happening on the ground, and just have their own culture-war opinion that ignores the nuance of the situation.
> Yeah, but they could've overturned it if they didn't like it.
The question is if they could've passed it to begin with. There is nothing in the constitution giving Congress the power to delegate its lawmaking authority to the executive branch, much less deprive the courts of their interpretive role.
> Should the policies and regulations of 100s of industries be decided by:
> 1. People who are only familiar with court proceedings 2. Experts in those industries with experience in those industries
The first one is actually better, because it makes it harder for the industry to capture the decisionmakers. Meanwhile the experts are still in the court, they just have to argue their case before the judge instead of having the parties argue their case before the "experts" with a sack of cash.
> The Supreme Court is explicitly not supposed to represent the will of the people.
Source ? Asking as a non American
It seems to me there are multiple understanding of the role of scotus in general and the inoperative rules of the constitution. "Explicitly not supposed to represent the will of the people" seems to be one perspective but not the only one.
Every constitutional democraty will have a tension between the constitutional and democratic part. And that tension will be felt in all of its institutiona
Could you expand on "our fundamental rights extend to the modern era" and how that connects to the legality of abortion being based on the right to privacy?
The "right to privacy" includes the right to medical privacy and privacy over your body. It's not the government's concern to dictate what and how you can treat your own body. The natural extension being that it violates the 14th Amendment for the government to surveil intimate medical decisions.
The "modern era" part comes from the majority opinion of Roe, which notes that abortion was viewed in a much better light when the constitution was written. Anti-abortion sentiment is a fairly modern phenomenon.
“It is thus apparent that at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect.”
The "right to privacy" includes the right to medical privacy and privacy over your body. It's not the government's concern to dictate what and how you can treat your own body. The natural extension being that it violates the 14th Amendment for the government to surveil intimate medical decisions.
This puts the cart before the horse. This assumes abortion is already a fine thing to do. Think about the other applications of privacy. Here is a pretty extreme hypo (we could get into a more subtle one maybe but this is the first thing that came to my mind). You are entitled to privacy in your home. In your home you can abuse your spouse and you can drink orange juice. Abusing your spouse is obviously wrong so we would never say privacy covers it. Drinking orange juice is obviously fine so we would say you are entitled to privacy from others to know if you drank orange juice or not. In both cases the police may never know you did either but that has no bearing on their legality. It seems to be the real central question and where a right would need to be grounded is if it is your body or the child's body. A lot of people disagree on this. If you don't think it is your body than the privacy argument makes no sense.
In terms of the history I have not dug into it but there seems to be conflicting arguments based on your priors. It doesn't seem cut and dry enough to just say it was a right then so it is now, if it was why not just do that instead of the whole privacy deal?
From Dobbs majority opinion: "English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treaties' statements that abortion was a crime."
I am also skeptical of origionalism. I don't know how much bearing 13-18th century common law should have on modern day law, especially when there was assuredly a diverse set of opinions on abortion just like today. Why shouldn't the 20th century have the same amount of weight as the 18th?
To me it seems that even if you believe abortion is morally right Roe was legislating from the bench. These things should come from congress not the supreme court.
It doesn't assume abortion is an okay thing to do. It assumes you have complete control and privacy over your own body - which you do.
An unborn fetus has never been granted rights in our constitution or anywhere else. It does not have personhood. There is only then one person here: the owner of the body.
> Abusing your spouse
This doesn't work, because your spouse has personhood and therefore rights.
To be clear, this has never been solved by any courts in the US. We still do not consider the unborn to be American citizens with individual personhood. The Supreme Court decided that's hard, so they just didn't do it when Roe was overturned. They essentially "carved out" an exception to privacy for exactly one-use case - Abortion.
You can certainly drink while pregnant. You can certainly smoke while pregnant. Because that is your body and your right, and you are exactly one person. None of that has changed from a legal standpoint. Now, you are one person with every right to privacy... except one.
I think, if you wish to ban abortion, you have to start at the core issue - who is considered a person, and who isn't? WHEN does an arrangement of cells become coherent enough to be considered a person? The reason nobody wants to answer this is because it's very hard, and there's a lot of unfortunate implications.
Then the Supreme Court "cheated", in my opinion.
> These things should come from congress not the supreme court
They already did come from Congress, when Congress passed the 14th amendment, in my opinion.
> The Supreme Court is explicitly not supposed to represent the will of the people.
The problem is, they have to, to a certain point. All government institutions ultimately derive their power from the willingness of the governed to live by their laws. Most decisions are minor enough and stacked with enough legalese that the average American doesn't care, but when you have more and more decisions that are as far out of right-field as the recent court has been making and corrupt justices making those decisions, it erodes the willingness of people to live under those decisions as time goes on.
> (shoehorning abortion rights into a right to privacy is a stretch).
I mean, only if you want the government telling twelve-year-olds that they'll need to push a baby out of a pelvis that is not yet wide enough to safely give birth.
The idea of "privacy" in this context is that generally speaking, it's not the government's business what you do with your body while knowingly and consensually under the care of a doctor. That is private for purposes of what the government can tell you to do. Maybe "confidentiality" would be a better term for the court to have used, but it's not a completely weird term.
I don't agree with overruling Chevron but saying "if they are going to try and override Chevron from the bench without legislation, then we have to ignore them" makes no sense because Chevron was not made by legislation in the first place. It was made by SCOTUS. It comes from the case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.
I'm pretty sure Chevron deference includes some deferred powers of congress to presidential administrative agencies. Which is what I'm referring to here. I could be wrong about that.
But the rules I'm thinking of are more about Roe V. Wade, which don't make sense in their interpretation of the laws.
It also goes to the heart of the arbitrariness of the rulings if they can overturn previous precedent 'just because they want to' which is a lot of the logic of the rulings.
Brown v. Board is famous for not just overturning the precedent, but for giving a reasonable understanding of the precedent was meaningfully unfair in the previous setup.
Why would Chevron need to be overridden by legislation when it wasn’t created by legislation? It was created by the courts so logically it could be struck down by the courts.
And the courts are not supposed to represent the “will of the people”. Law is not a popularity contest.
The FTC has the power to make rules about "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce." All the lack of Chevron deference means is the courts are more willing to step in to decide whether or not a rule falls under that. So in this case it makes it harder for FTC to fight a hypothetical NYT lawsuit, but far from impossible.
In practice abolishing Chevron deference mostly means rules will follow the politics of judges rather than the current administration. TBH I think this rule is far enough from the culture war that it will probably stand anyway. Unless the NYT happens to buy the judges a lot of vacations...
> In practice abolishing Chevron deference mostly means rules will follow the politics of judges rather than the current administration. TBH I think this rule is far enough from the culture war that it will probably stand anyway. Unless the NYT happens to buy the judges a lot of vacations...
I want to agree with you but the vote was split down party lines completely with 2 dissenters being republican.
In France, (EU maybe ?), it's restricted only to subscriptions made online. That does seems reasonable to not enforce online presence to people/business who aren't present on the internet.
Internet services are not excluded, but you have to make the subscription online (from a library computer, GSM network or previous Internet Subscription for example).
Oh, even if it's mandatory, doesn't mean it's easy. "Free" and "Orange" (French ISPs) hide the "cancellation link" (Résiliation in french) in the footer of the home page and never tell about it in any other way but the link does work.
That is my question too, insurance companies make it easy to get a policy online, but require you to call to cancel. I looked through the FTC site, but could not find an answer to this.
LPT: if you're not a customer but you get their mailing advertisements and want them to stop, create an account with them on their website then update your address to their headquarters.
If you call and tell them to stop, they will only stop for 2 years then resume. Or resume when you take your vehicle to someplace that (re)sells your information to them.
If you really want to make them stop then take their return postage paid envelope, get a brick, use clear tape to wrap it around the brick, and drop it in the nearest mailbox. They have to pay the difference between the postage they paid and what it costs to have a brick delivered.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant (excepting Alice)
Sounds like a lot more work then just getting them to spam themselves.
The USPS has an FAQ about mailing bricks, but it won't load for me. I do know they are allowed to throw away trash, and they could interpret a brick as trash.
There are so many things like this that have needed fixing for such a long time. The fact that something is happening, even slowly, is so heartening.
If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.
Agreed. The fact that multiple companies are springing up with the main selling point being "help you cancel subscriptions you thought you already cancelled" should be a wake up call to the legislature that this problem has gotten out of hand.
I think a great function of elected representatives would be keeping an eye out for these types of businesses that are societal "code smells" indicating something is wrong, and looking at the regulatory and legislative environment to see what would be changed to make those businesses obsolete.
Those who are pro-market probably consider the companies cropping up to be evidence that legislation is not needed (as the market is addressing the issue). I'm not such a person, fwiw.
I would definitely consider myself pro-market, and "market > government" has proven itself a pretty good default time and time again. That doesn't mean nothing should ever be regulated.
I don't think any free market capitalist outside of the most extreme libertarians think that markets should be completely unregulated. It is well known that free markets have areas where they are market failures or can never be Pareto efficient. Basically any "tragedy of the commons" type scenario is such a case. Unfortunately governments like to get their grubby fingers into everything and try to regulate their way out of problems.
yeah, it's a failure mode of the open market. "We've allowed services to exist that unnecessarily cost you money so the solution is more services that will take more money." If we're being honest, at some point the golden cow of Efficiency is undermined.
The societal ethics of Ozempic are an example of this. We've created policies and subsidies that flood the food market with unhealthy processed food to the point that the cheapest option is an unnatural amount of calories (compare US obesity rates to the rest of the world), so the solution is a pharma product that takes an additional cut of your wallet. It's an expensive solution to an expensive problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
The software analogy is it's always easier to slap on one more piece of duct tape tech debt than to do the difficult thing and refactor the whole thing (acknowledging that part of the refactoring difficulty is you're not guaranteed to end up in a better state than you started from...)
More pragmatically, the fact that such a business exists might be a sign that we're too late to regulate this. Now there is a constituency who can use the profits from keeping the system broken to lobby to keep the system broken. Look at TurboTax as an example, or defense contracting reform, or the affordable care act. Within the rules of neoliberal capitalism, you can't really use the government to address problems that somebody somewhere is making money from.
Still waiting on anything to be done about rent to own businesses. The businesses that rely solely on exploiting the people in a bad position bother me so much, they should at least have some kind of limits on their usury.
Unfortunately the people they "serve" would get nothing as nobody can afford to lend to a bad credit risk at reasonable rates. Of course a lot of what they are selling are luxuries that people with bad credit shouldn't have, but then we have to ask what the alternative is. (most places have terrible public transit so you have to get such people in a car. You don't need a TV for movies but you can't really live life without internet anymore as many forms assume online and the alternatives don't work well)
A lot of companies, most, will leave marginalized people behind explicitly to avoid developing solutions for their edge cases. "We don't want those customers." It's come to the point where they try to exclude them up front by requiring 2FA via SMS to establish accounts.
It's hard to argue against that. I suppose it's not that they even exist, it's just the unreasonable amount they profit on the items. If it's purely because they cannot attain items another way, they markup should be more apparent maybe? It just hurts seeing young and disadvantaged people being taken advantage of.
The problem is that "excessive regulation" often means "regulations that inconvenience me". Often regulations are put in place to help somebody else, and they are met with wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Some regulations help me. I'm glad I don't have to sort through all the pipes to find lead free ones. However some hurt me - I know very well how to do electric work and so having to hire an electrician costs me money I don't have (as opposed to an inspector who is much cheaper since they only verify I did the work right).
This is specific to my town, if I lived across the street in a different town I wouldn't need to. Unfortunately I didn't know this detail until after I bought the house.
Typically, when this happens and it's a local law like this it's because something really bad happened in the past.
I know, for example, the town of Cripple Creek, CO requires all their buildings to be made out of bricks. Pretty annoying. But it's because the entire town burned down twice in the 19th century.
So, maybe, someone in the past killed a bunch of people with bad electrical work.
One that stung me the other day, Amazon, a $152 charge showing up on my card.
Realized that it was an annual renewal of Prime. No email notification or anything. Dig around, there is an option to get a reminder email, but it defaults to off.
This is a growing trend too, reduced or no notification of renewal, even on annual subscriptions, so you get hit with a three digit charge out of nowhere (not that it's not our responsibility to track these things, but many of us do so less than we'd like).
I refuse to sign up for subscriptions in many cases for that reason. Same reason I won't sign up for 6 months no payments or interest for things I'm buying - by paying cash I ensure I won't forget to pay in 6 months and then just get the minimum payment withdrawn. Large parts of the world are built to scam you and they know how to make scams seem like a good deal.
Even if he doesn't, the supreme court justices that he installed will just say, ackshually, we interpret the constitution to say that this is the purview of the judicial branch, natch.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted (jk I know exactly why). HN will have an entire goddamn Bollywood dance number around the fact that big corporations screw people over, and government has to come in and fix it. "Omg wow, this is great! Why didn't we do this sooner?" Well, tech has a spasming tantrum every time anyone even hints at maybe not letting companies do whatever they want all the time, including most of the people here, and Congress has long since been captured by business interests and people who think the government makes hurricanes.
The solutions are not at all technically challenging, our political system just isn't effective anymore. That's why regulatory bodies do what they can to make rules while Congress and tech companies sit around counting their money.
There is absolutely no chance Trump's donors, which include the A16Z clowns, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and a lot of anti-regulation people in Silicon Valley, are going to allow Lina Khan to stick around. Vice presidents have no power, and Vance is not on the ticket because Trump is interested in his opinion on the FTC. He's on the ticket because he said he wouldn't have peacefully transferred power like Pence did, and that's the only reason.
It's not worth the bits this line was printed to screen with.
Trump will do away with the FTC because it stands in the way of their goal of dismantling the executive administration. The only thing JD Vance supports about keeping Lina Khan is keeping her captured and institutionally bound so she cannot bring legislation forward against their agenda as a citizen.
This feels like one of those things that could be solved on the payment end with something like a unique payment ID for each subscription, rather than giving a CC number. Then you just enable or disable payment IDs (perhaps for a limited time, e.g., "create a payment ID that works for Netflix for the next three months but not after that"), rather than relying on vendors to decide whether they feel like charging you or not.
My understanding is that under the hood this does happen, but in the company's favor-some memberships will survive your credit card changing?
There was a patio11 article about it which I can't find at the moment. (edit: maybe not. maybe it was a tweet? in any case I remember it being a thing)
well, the idea is that you have a contract with them and that determines the money you owe, not the actual card. There's some mechanism under the hood to update the recurring subscription to use your new card when it changes.
The problem, is that not paying does not get you out of the legal obligation to pay. Most companies won't follow up because the cost isn't worth it, but there are definitely organizations that will go after you or sell your debts to collection agencies...
The marginal cost to a gym/ISP of the remaining duration of your contract is basically zero, especially if you're not going to use it, and they can get a few more dollars by being a jackass about it. In aggregate the incentives dominate.
I don't think these sorts of contracts should be illegal. I think a lot of things around them should be, like gyms requiring you to go in-person to cancel, or offering a terrible phone service to cancel, or marketing it deceptively such that you were unaware it was a contract.
But getting a discount in exchange for a longer-term commitment is often a benefit to consumers.
I just paid Visible for a year of cellular service up front and it was far cheaper than paying monthly – truly a great deal. I was able to front that money now, but if I paid a slightly higher per-month price in exchange for a year contract, that would be the same but with less money required up front.
There are contracts that are basically impossible to terminate and offer basically no benefit to anyone, timeshares is a key example of it.
A problem with our contract law is that if you get anything out of a contract it becomes really hard to terminate if the terms don't allow for it (a peppercorn). With contracts now being written in dense legalese with multiple pages of terms and conditions, it's not really feasible to expect the common contractor to have a full understanding of exactly what they are signing up for.
> But getting a discount in exchange for a longer-term commitment is often a benefit to consumers.
This is already framing it in marketing terms. You're not getting a discount but being charged an artificial price premium for less/no commitment. This can get especially obscene in places where gyms are required by law to offer monthly membership options but they charge a significant markup if you go that route.
All of this has the effect of suppressing competition.
I don't think this is a bad idea. Each month you would confirm whether you want to continue with the service, and if you say no or don't respond, it stops. If you think this would be annoying, then pay for a year (or more) in advance. This method would in theory reduce/remove the ability for folks to perform mid-month chargebacks under the guise of "I forgot to cancel".
Just make it so that you can remove the authorization of vendors to charge you. You see a vendor charging you for a service you no longer want - click a button and remove their authorization to charge you.
Yet currently, we have the opposite, financial institutions will "helpfully" update your card details with merchants you have recurring charges with.
Years ago at Key Bank I even argued with a teller and manager about blocking a recalcitrant merchant from charging our account, "But you have ongoing charges with them and if we decline the transaction..."
Yeah, that's between me and them, you shouldn't be inserting into this to 'obligate' me to pay.
Cancelling of a subscription payment, without simultaneously notifying eg continuation (such as through an alternate payment means), is a clear and unequivocal indication of termination of the agreement for which the payment was being made.
A company has a simple avenue to avoid inadvertent cancellation, they just ask the customer "did you mean to cancel, please contact us by $date to continue your subscription".
But that's preferring the citizen over business interests.
If it is easy to cancel then you should cancel. However if it is hard have your credit card cancel for you. (not all will, but some will) The advantage is they work for you and can put pressure on merchants to make it easy so they don't have to be the middleman.
A number of credit card companies offer virtual card numbers that you can generate to avoid giving out your real number. I agree that it should be more normalized, widespread, and automatic, but it is already possible to start doing this today.
Yeah, I was thinking of what I could do with a company Brex card - but I can't with my personal CC, at least not directly through my bank (though as others note apparently Google Pay does this now).
A problem mentioned is that whilst this cuts off the payment, in law it may not remove the liability to pay, so the company could in future chase you for the payments.
you're describing virtual credit cards with controls, like amount, vendor, time of month, etc. it's an awesome service that limits your widespread exposure to one company vs. everyone you've every bought anything from.
You can do this with PayPal, Google Play, and privacy.com. Probably others too, these are just the ones I've used.
The thing is that sometimes you need to actually cancel the service, not just stop paying for it, to remove your financial obligations. Depending on the contract you signed.
Last year I had a company (DomainsPricedRight/OwnMyDomain aka GoDaddy) that I last did business (a one time purchase) with 18 years prior (2005), bill me under a new "subscription" with no input on my part.
PayPal sort of allows you to prevent that but it seems only with companies you have recently done business with.
PayPal did do a good job of email notification of the automatic payment and cancelling the "subscription" but there is no easy way to reverse the fraudulent payment, so in the end the consumer still gets burned for profit (it was only $1 but how many people had $1 stolen?)
Agreed, I had similar where I had signed up for a trial with a subscription, sure, and then went to cancel. "This can be done by 'manage payments' in PayPal." or similar. This existed, but the subscription was not there. But sure enough, it got charged. They did reverse it at least, but was more painful than it had to be.
It isn't something I've seen advertised by credit card companies here (UK) but in the US at least some offer virtual cards whereby you can give different vendors a specific virtual card and cancel that if they don't stop taking payments when you want them to.
As much as I'm not a big fan of PayPal¹ I use that rather than separate credit card payments/subs for online purchases including subs for things like hosting accounts. Stopping a payment from their web UI seems like it would be easier than arranging a chargeback or calling the CC company to put a block on future payments, and it reduces the number of companies that I hand my credit card details too. When I cancel a service I make sure that the sub is cancelled there as well. I always follow the cancellation procedure at the other end too, unless it is obnoxiously bothersome, as just cancelling the payment method feels like I'm being dickish².
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[1] I'm not sure that I'd risk a business account with them, and I hardly ever keep a balance there, due to the many stories of accounts being frozen for long periods with litle reason and inadequate review.
[2] You might argue that often they'd be more than happy to be dickish, hence the cancellation procedures, but I prefer not to stoop to that level whether they would or not.
My PayPal story (in short, search my comments if you want more detail) - I bought a cheap game (<£5) on Steam. The game was broken, Steam wouldn't refund and so broke UK Consumer Rights Act.
I contacted PayPal, who opened a case, according to their agreement with Steam (which I'm not party to). PayPal found Steam to be in breach of their agreement (PayPal & Steam's). I was refunded.
Then Steam enacted petty revenge against me, and continue to do so.
PayPal acted laudibly, imo, but there seems to be nothing one can then do about any revenge a company might take against a customer.
A hypothetical might be that you return damaged goods to Amazon, then they refuse to sell to you in the future because you demanded your legal rights.
A computer retailer appears to have done similar. I had to return goods to them that were broken on arrival; they refunded, but closed my account (I have assumed that this was because of the refund request). They do have a general right to drop a customer, or refuse service (outside of protected characteristics) but it seems wrong that "making a reasonable demand in view of legislation" (a device was broken when it arrived) is apparently an allowable reason for refusal of future service.
The real problem here is that the banks make the rules and they like rules that allow them to covertly screw everyone.
What you really want is a system where a customer who issues a chargeback that isn't disputed gets the money back, but the merchant also doesn't get a chargeback fee because there is no dispute. And then if there is a dispute (and the customer still wants to do the chargeback), the chargeback fee is loser pays. Then you have a reasonable way for customers to issue legitimate chargebacks that still discourages illegitimate ones.
What we have instead is that if you do a chargeback, the merchant gets whacked with a chargeback fee in the range of $20-$50. Obviously the banks love this; they get the money. But the merchants respond by banning customers who do this, because if you make a $5 purchase with a $1.50 margin and then issue a chargeback, the risk that you do it again before you make enough purchases to even recover the first one is too large.
But if you prohibited merchants from dropping customers over that then there would be no deterrent to fraudulent chargebacks (or to using the chargeback system with the eye-watering fees instead of the merchant's RMA process), so there would be more of them, and merchants would have to raise prices on everybody else even more to cover the bank's fees.
Whereas if you had a balanced system that minimized fraudulent chargebacks while still allowing (and eliminating fees for undisputed) legitimate ones, that would minimize chargeback fees, which is exactly what the banks don't want.
My original post in this trail described how I minimise the risk that I have to faf around because of the status quo, which also reduces the potential for my direct payment data leaking due to security snafus, in the absence of the virtual card option in my locale. The one you replied to questioned one point in your description, which seemed to suggest that being banned by a bad trader was a problem.
Though I'll grant that being blocked could be an issue if that merchant was the only supplier for something that you particularly need.
For me, I still buy games on Steam because my kids want them (I just try hard to find them elsewhere first). Steam just make it hard for me to do that, which is insane when the root of preventing me is a couple of quid they refused to refund when they sold a game they knew was broken.
Of course they don't care about that, it's the £10s across millions of customers that they possibly retain unlawfully that makes it worthwhile.
India basically has this - when creating subscriptions, merchants typically create "mandates" which specify max amount permitted per month, frequency, and duration.
Afterwards, 1) if per month amount is greater than a regulated threshold, manual confirmation is needed. [ This is friction ] , 2) cancelling can be as simple as going to your bank's website and deleting the "mandate".
In all honesty, this is probably a really balanced approach, but the roll out was a real pain, with banks and merchants collaborating on who supports whom, etc. International payments got screwed completely - to this day, I can't subscribe to nytimes, after almost 2.5 years of this.
"Fees" on top of the top line price should be illegal. It's just a way to smuggle in a 100% increase in the purchase price to get an initial buy in for a product. It is super scammy.
Heck, I would even take this a step further and say that taxes as well should always be fully included in the topline price. If a company wants to add a breakdown of how much went to taxes, I'm ok with that.
The sticker price should always be the full price.
As a British person this is always so alien when traveling in the US. You could go one step further and suggest that perhaps tips which are practically mandatory should be included in the headline price but that might be a step too far.
Many restaurants have tried this, and end up switching back because comparing prices to other restaurants puts them at a disadvantage. I think the only way for it to happen is regulation that forces it. Might as well include taxes in that price too.
Staff often doesn’t like it either. Probably some combination of actually making less money and being overly optimistic about what they would be making if they were getting tips. a bar I was aware of that advertised paying $20+ and hour with no tips switched to a tipped model due to staff complaints.
it sounds like what happened is management simply did not replace the tipped wage with an appropriate flat wage. if management provided a satisfactory wage, nobody would complain.
there would be a rough transition period, but i do believe that in countries where tipping is not the norm, places just pay more to get better stuff the way non-tipped labor already works.
one of the breweries i live by recently moved from non-tipped to tip, and it's generally a disliked change from what I hear because most of the time the brewery is open it's not busy enough to make up for the loss in wages, and then people fight over the really busy shifts.
The trouble is that sales tax can be different in every municipality. National advertising would be a nightmare. However, I think prices at brick and mortar stores should be tax included and, when shopping online, if my address is known, the tax should be include as well.
I also think "plus Tax/Tax included" should be featured more prominently but I think that businesses would likely do that themselves given the conditions above so that, when comparing prices, you would very noticeably see that whether tax was included or not in your price. ie, Amazon would put in green letters near the price "Tax included" so when I compared their price to another place I would know why Amazon's price might be higher.
I agree that tips are stupid. But they are technically different as you can pay the price without them and be fine. This is unlike "convenience fees" and tax which are required but not displayed in the advertised price.
I definitely believe that you should be able to purchase something for the advertised price. Maybe that is "starting at" but you should be able to check out at that price.
tipping culture is so annoying here in the Bay Area. the other day i was at a coffee shop and cashier handed me a device that had suggested tips from 18-22% with no obvious Cancel button. i was infuriated and the cashier had a smug look on her face. she knew what i was looking for and she didn't bother telling me how to skip it. mind you, this was for a coffee to-go order.
I get very annoyed at things like that where there shouldn't be a tip. Tip is for service quality and counter service there is no differentiation in service between different servers. People do go to restaurants and ask for their favorite waiter. There often is a difference in service between different waiters at the same restaurant - enough that I like the ability to pay for good service (if you always give the same tip you are doing it wrong - you should be giving as many 10% tips as 20%.
That would be nice, but there is a LOT of background work before that is feasible (in the US). As it currently stands, for many products a vendor would need to know who you are and where you live before they could quote you a total price. That's unacceptable.
but you did say that figuring out the final price is "unacceptable"? why is it unacceptable? my point is that other countries have figured out a way to display the final prices, but USA still hasn't figured out how to do it or they don't have any plans to do it.
Actually there's a purpose to keeping taxes separate. Policymakers want the tax burden to be visible, it is not part of price transparency because the vendor has nothing to do with the tax rate.
I meant states of the USA. It looks like it's not as bad as it used to be (time for me to read a few more laws I guess). A decade ago WA prohibited the practice. I'm not sure where it might currently be illegal.
Yes, but much like cigarette lobbying, you want to look at who's paying for the given outcome. We have cigarette minimum prices because it increases profits for tobacco companies, and we have this fraudulent price reporting nonsense because lower advertised prices result in more sales. Transparency could just as easily be achieved via a tax breakdown on the receipts merchants are already required to provide on request, while correctly advertising what the consumer will actually pay.
The trouble is, without some overriding authority defining what it means to "have a plane ticket", what counts as "included"? Because anything that doesn't can then be considered an "add-on".
Carry-on luggage. Meal/snack and beverage service. A pillow and blanket. A seat that's not a middle seat. Even the ability to choose your seat at all.
Airlines that want to tighten the screws on their passengers can, in theory, start charging for all of those, and calling them "paid add-ons", even under a "no junk fees" law, if we don't clearly define what passengers should be able to expect to be included in their ticket.
I get you. AFAICT what's included for airlines is basically "get me from A to B".
There are usually ways to filter out by seat types, though, both on airlines websites and in places like Google flights. In my experience those are also pretty accurate.
The comparison price for flights should be normalized. Like for example including either a carry on luggage or a checked in bag but not necessarily both, and no reserved seat.
If some even cheaper airline wants to sell tickets without carry on or whatever then they’ll have to list the higher price and offer a pleasant surprise of a lower-than-advertised price when the customer completed the booking.
There are some completely new and wacky fee structures though. I recently flew Avelo airlines - baggage fees were a function of when I paid - rising as I got closer to the flight date.
You're describing legitimate add-ons though. The most important part about plane tickets is that I get from A to B. If whatever price compare tool I'm using doesn't let me select the add-ons I want, I can at least find the cheapest base price of a few competitors and then go from there.
If I need luggage, I can do my own legwork to make sure that I factor that in.
None of those things should be included. I want none and dont want to pay for having access to them. What we actually need is a business that lets you put in the add ons you want and shows you how much that would cost.
I am happy with the current situation. Airlines are segmented so that people like me can fly spirit or frontier for rock bottom rates and people who want to enjoy the flight can fly delta or whoever.
Right up front: I agree. But, implementing this will be an absolute PITA because so many other things are systemically broken.
Case in point: cost breakdown from the invoice of an online order a few months ago (with the dollar amounts removed):
> Subtotal
> Shipping (Economy)
> Tax (Solano County Tax 0.25%)
> Tax (Vacaville City Tax 0.75%)
> Tax (Solano County District Tax Sp 0.125%)
> Tax (Solano Co Local Tax Sl 1.0%)
> Tax (California State Tax 6.0%)
Once your address is known taxes can be calculated. At what point is an after-tax final price to be shown? On an ad? On a targeted Ad? Once you reach the storefront based on unreliable geolocation? (which would be wrong for me, because geolocation bundles two cities here together as one) Once you create an account? At the checkout when you've specified the shipping address? As things tend to happen today, its usually only at the last step.
As much as I'd like to see it, I don't see much chance of improving the visibility of final prices without comprehensive systemic tax reform first.
The obvious quick solutions aren't exactly fair in the current US system. Imagine a "quick fix" of requiring the vendors to price in-a generic taxes for everyone. Just like with credit card system fees, "simple" fixes like that that benefit the residents of high-sales-tax states to the detriment of no-sales-tax state residents. While such a system would work for physical stores, they would get hammered if they had to prices on the shelves or signs that were higher than online prices.
As much as we all want a fair straight-forward system, I don't imagine it happening any time soon in the US. There are way too many unresolved zero-sum political fights and ideological differences standing in the way.
It certainly can be done (eg: Australia) but the circumstances there were very different.
I agree, it is not currently feasible in all cases. But something like AirBNB should be straightforward. Price tags on store shelves also straightforward. As you point out, it's tough for online shopping, at least until you have an established account. For advertising purposes it would be tough.
My guess is the only solution (and it would suck and be met with much resistance) would be to make all the taxes based strictly on where the seller is, not where the buyer is. Then the buyer would have to be on hook for use tax instead of sales tax. States would not like this because most people skip paying use tax altogether.
Or just get rid of sales tax as a thing, and if you want localized taxes put them on property. That's what my state does (plus income tax).
I agree that we're unlikely to see any sane solution in the US in our lifetime.
It's really simple: ban sales taxes levied by anyone except the national government. That's how other countries do it, and it works fine. Then everyone in the whole country pays the same tax rate, no matter where they are.
Short of that, ban sales taxes levied by local governments; only allow states to levy them. It's easy enough to figure out which state someone is in.
The government needs to provide a service if we ever want taxes to be included. Taxes vary by city and can even depend on where you live, so sellers wouldn't be able to give you a price until you say where you are and where you're from for some sales.
That's why you basically need a third party if you run an ecommerce website, unless you have a team to track down every time a county or city changes their taxes.
>That's why you basically need a third party if you run an ecommerce website, unless you have a team to track down every time a county or city changes their taxes.
Every ecommerce site already has to calculate taxes on checkout, already has a third party for this information (usually the payment processor).
I have good news! (as long as Lina Khan stays on as commissioner)
> FTC Proposes Rule to Ban Junk Fees: The proposed rule would ban businesses from running up the bills with hidden and bogus fees, ensure consumers know exactly how much they are paying and what they are getting, and help spur companies to compete on offering the lowest price. Businesses would have to include all mandatory fees when telling consumers a price
She may not be around for long (a travesty in my opinion if so). Neither presidential candidate is stumping for her kind of activism, even the Dem one. And the big money wants her gone.
Sure we can vote, but it seems big money has more influence regardless.
While the candidates may not like her, support for her crosses party lines and so there may be enough people to make a stink about it to make it politically unviable. I do concede that both candidates are just terrible on this.
> Neither presidential candidate is stumping for her kind of activism, even the Dem one
Harris hasn't outright said she would keep on Khan, but from a policy perspective I think they are very aligned, even to the point of Harris copying Khan's homework a bit (not in a bad way, just interesting). They have both explicitly called out grocery revenue growth exceeding total costs, both want to go after PBMs to lower drug prices, both want to go after junk fees, both have come out against algorithmic rent pricing, both have called out misclassification of workers.
If Harris does want to keep her on I still don't think it's in either of their interests for Harris to stake out a position. It opens the Harris campaign up to attacks on Khan's many court setbacks and erodes whatever bipartisan support Khan still has. Also, Harris doesn't have to do anything to keep her on, if she doesn't appoint anyone then by law Khan will remain acting commissioner indefinitely.
Her big funders are pushing for Khan's removal (e.g. Mark Cuban). The big issue that these people have against Khan is the blocking of mergers that's a big source of bonuses for Wall St.
Hmmm...the phone companies have this down to a fine art. Get legislation passed that lets you charge a fee, show it on the bill as a "regulatory fee." Just like how the cable companies and banks send scare envelopes to senior citizens to get them to sign up for add ons and shitty insurance plans.
Plane tickets show you all included price including taxes/fee. It was part of 2012 regulation requiring full fare disclosure passed in 2012. Telecom/Internet providers ares ones that need to be fixed because companies like Verizon will charge you bogus "taxes" like a network portability tax which isn't a tax and they pocket the money.
Even then, there's other challenges. With Delta, booking a flight, I see a rough return airfare when I select my outbound leg, that then might be tweaked by my inbound leg choices.
Booking with Alaska, I get a fare listed that is only the outbound leg, and then I have to discover the inbound leg price.
This often gives the impression that fares are or will be cheaper with Alaska, and then after a few clicks, you realize that they're (mostly) the "same".
> The fact that something is happening, even slowly
Regulation like this, as necessary and obvious as this one is, should happen slowly. There are way too many short sighted, reactionary laws and regulations to begin with.
meh, it is just an executive regulation that will go away the next time the party in power changes if it isn't shot down in court first.
it doesn't help my skepticism that these sort of people/consumer first policies don't come out of these administrations until it is election time. They could have done this years ago but why if they couldn't benefit as well?
The FTC has been on a bit of a tear since Khan was appointed in 2021. I guess this one finally made it through the paperwork now. Sort by date here to see a bunch of tech-related stuff they've done under this admin: https://arstechnica.com/search/?q=ftc
lol, ok. I don't know what a "tear" is but everything listed there is either a lawsuit or news that a court struck down their policy. I don't see other policies like this one. Also check the dates, way off. haha
https://grammarist.com/idiom/on-a-tear/ - "On a tear means someone is in a state of energetic activity, often with a hint of recklessness or enthusiasm, usually after a period of quiet or inactivity."
Such a long list you've shared. Besides lawsuits and policies already struck down what pro-consumer policy have the enacted prior to Nov 2023 (the start of the presidential election)
> meh, it is just an executive regulation that will go away the next time the party in power changes if it isn't shot down in court first.
As a general rule, it is _way harder_ to make things worse than to make things better, politically, especially where it is clear to the average person that you are making things worse, and this is something that most normal people will regard as making things better.
Now, you could argue that net neutrality was also one of these, but net neutrality is, to the layperson, fairly obscure, and easy for a government who wants to get rid of it to lie about. This rule isn't at all obscure, most people have personal experience of the problem it solves, and it would be virtually impossible to spin revoking it as a good thing.
> it doesn't help my skepticism that these sort of people/consumer first policies don't come out of these administrations until it is election time.
This is, more or less, just a problem with the American system of government; so much of the civil service is appointees that every four to eight years there is a period where everyone at the top of the organisation changes, causing everything to grind to a halt for a while.
My workaround to this has been to email the company telling them I want to cancel. Once I either don't get a reply, or get a reply saying "just call us and we'll cancel!", I dispute the next charge with American Express and have the email record of trying to cancel. I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature that cuts off future charges.
> I believe they also offer a "stop allowing charges by this merchant" feature
If they have this it's another reason to use them for automatic billing. I have tried to do this with a VISA card and they said they cannot do it; the only way to prevent future charges would be to close that account entirely and even then I might still get billed for some period of time.
American Express is a very special card that typically comes with annual fee that is very much worth it. I would never book any hotels, buy plane tickets or signup in any form of membership with any other card because I got burnt way too many times with Visa and MC is even worse. Also that's why businesses typically do not like AE because how easy it is to dispute the charge.
But to add - I discourage you from using chargeback as a feature to stop future charges. Most banks will report it to your credit bureau - you won't see it in form of points being withheld BUT it might be adverse for you when you try to get a loan, etc. My mother disputed way too many things (memory troubles at her age) and they did not renew her CC after expiration date and MasterCard told her she is not eligible for card with her excessive CB ratio.
> Most banks will report it to your credit bureau - you won't see it in form of points being withheld BUT it might be adverse for you when you try to get a loan, etc
I never knew this! I have heard about companies banning you if you request a CB, which would be really bad for things like Google, Uber, etc.
I usually end up having to dispute a charge only once a year or so. It has surprised me over the past few years how lacking AMEX seems to be in its "investigation". It at least used to take a few days and they'd sometimes ask for documentation. The last one I did got turned around in maybe an hour.
I use one of those banks that allows me to generate sub-accounts easily, each of which has an account number for e-checks and Debit card number. So I can use that for subscriptions, either fund it once, or fund it regularly via automated transfers from my main balance, or you can set it up to just automatically pull from your main account. Then when you're done with it, you can close that sub-account. It's worked very well for these sorts of subscriptions.
Specifically, I'm using Qube, but at this point I'm looking to move away from them and do not at all recommend them.
Check out Privacy.com for card generation. You can set monthly/yearly/all-limits, pause and cancel cards, create single-use cards, etc. And their virtual cards accept any billing information. As a result I don’t bother unsubscribing directly anymore and instead just pause the card. Less hassle. More control.
I’m also using Qube and looking to get away but I really like having the sub-accounts. What have you found? Envelope seems to have really nice features but lacks the sub-accounts.
Privacy.com has been increasing neutering their free tier and you cant fund with a credit card, their cards have reputation problems at merchants. They're one if the problems imho if we're talking about what's being sold if different than what's being bought.
This is good to know. I had Dropbox billing through PayPal and could never cancel charges in anyway through the Dropbox site. Realized I had to disassociate PayPal and the recurring charge said “payment failed”. Finally effectively canceled.
AmEx is great for this. I've used it twice, no issues that I can tell. I had my personal card attached to a BrowserStack account that used a work email address. Forgot to cancel it when I left the job and BrowserStack support was completely useless. One chat session with AmEx later and I receive no more charges from BrowserStack.
Of course I have to remember that they are blocked on that card, should I ever need an account again in the future.
The best workaround (imho) is just using virtual cards. My Venture X allows me to create a virtual card on the spot restricted to that merchant where I can also enter an optional lock date. If I want to try something, I just create a new card and set the lock date to the next day. Even if I forget to cancel, good luck charging my card :)
Although in practice I don't think it will be an issue, in theory issuing a chargeback on your credit card does not release you from any financial obligations you agreed to with a contract. And if that contract specifies that you must "call to cancel" I don't think "I emailed" will hold up in court (but IANAL). Of course with this FCC ruling that could very well not be the case, but in any case always be wary of issuing a chargeback and thinking the matter settled if you did actually have legitimate commerce with the business in question.
> Negative option offers come in a variety of forms, but all share a central feature: each contain a term or condition that allows a seller to interpret a customer's silence, or failure to take an affirmative action, as acceptance of an offer. Before describing the proposed amendments, it is helpful to review the various forms such an offer can take. Negative option marketing generally falls into four categories: prenotification plans, continuity plans, automatic renewals, and free trial (i.e., free-to-pay or nominal-fee-to-pay) conversion offers.
So the "negative option" seems to be referring either to silence-is-consent or an-explicit-no-option, and this rule is around how sellers present (or don't present) such ideas.
> will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up.
I am very curious what exactly this means? Is it the number of pages or forms you had to fill out? People you had to talk too?
So if for my internet I had to have someone come out to install it before service would start could they argue that they require someone to physically come out to turn off service? Or a call since a call would be "easier" than someone coming out?
Could they make the signup and cancel process worse at the same time at certain times of the year if there is a certain time of the year where cancelations are high to justify a worse process? Or does this require knowing what the process was like when each customer signed up?
It feels like this could be fairly easily manipulated. Throw in an extra page during sign up just so they can add in an extra "please stay" page when you try to cancel.
> most notably dropping a requirement that sellers provide annual reminders to consumers of the negative option feature of their subscription.
I assume this means sending yearly reminders that a subscription is about to charge and how to cancel? This is fairly disappointing if so.
I really wish they just required what Apple requires on the App Store. It requires 2 clicks, clicking cancel and then confirm. No upselling since it all happens within Apple's Settings.
Then any yearly apps I always get an email about a week or so (not 100% sure of the timing) that it is going to renew soon with instructions on how to cancel.
> They didn't require someone to come out to get you signed up for service.
I am struggling a bit to understand how Comcast could not argue that it is required?
I don't fully remember but I don't think I started paying anything for my service until someone came out to install when self install wasn't an option. (I could possibly see them justifying removing self install in the name of retention later, since how many people really have a choice in their ISP and will just not deal with waiting for someone to come?).
If service was unable to start until someone came out, to me that could be argued as part of the sign up process.
I am not necessarily agreeing that it is part of the signup process. But we know that these companies love their shady practices and will have their lawyers finding any loophole they can find.
They didn't come out as part of sign up, they came out for install, which is a separate phase. You signed up on the phone or online. They don't need to remove hardware from your house to turn it off.
Is there a requirement that a signup flow is a single process that you do all at once?
What if they just moved the last contract you had to sign to something that you clicked on the technicians phone after they set everything up?
I get that it is part of the install process and we think of it as a different phase. But in reality how much of a diasctintion is that really?
I am trying to understand what is realistically stopping Comcast from saying that the signup process is not complete until service has been activated? Nothing I am seeing or what is being said here is telling me they could not argue this.
> I am trying to understand what is realistically stopping Comcast from saying that the signup process is not complete until service has been activated? Nothing I am seeing or what is being said here is telling me they could not argue this.
In theory, the economics of this don't work out (Comcast/ISPs might be an exception). It would raise their onboarding costs a lot and raise their offboarding costs too. But if they're a local monopoly the might get away with it.
> What if they just moved the last contract you had to sign to something that you clicked on the technicians phone after they set everything up?
That doesn't side step this - if you sign up in person they have to provide a telephone or online option to cancel that is just as easy as it was to sign up.
Now you'll need to return the hardware if you're using Comcast's hardware. Nothing changes there.
> could they argue that they require someone to physically come out to turn off service?
In the case of in-person consent the rule requires that they also offer an online or telephone cancellation option.
> Could they make the signup and cancel process worse at the same time [...]
"must be at least as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used
to consent to the Negative Option Feature.". I read that it must hold true for every specific consumer based on how hard it was for them to consent.
The rules also sets general restrictions to the online and phone options in addition to the "at least as easy" restriction. For Online the cancellation option must be "easy to find" and explicitly bars forced interaction with representatives or chatbots during cancellation unless they were part of the sign-up process. For Telephone the cancellation must be prompt, the number must be answered or accept voice messages, must be available during normal business hours, and must not be more costly than a call used to sign up.
> I really wish they just required what Apple requires on the App Store. It requires 2 clicks, clicking cancel and then confirm. No upselling since it all happens within Apple's Settings.
It's complicated.
If all anti-piracy measures were enforced successfully, such as they are on Apple platforms; if there were insurmountable paywalls everywhere; but, subscriptions were cheaper, would you be better off? What about the average person? What is the right policy?
You're overthinking it. If there's any confusion, it will go to court, and reasonable humans will decide that, actually, the form being in a filing cabinet in the basement isn't actually reasonable.
> reasonable humans will decide that, actually, the form being in a filing cabinet in the basement isn't actually reasonable.
Like how multiple courts (up to the Louisiana Supreme Court) ruled that it was reasonable that when a suspect said "I want a lawyer, dawg." that police interpreted it as him asking for a canine who had been admitted to the bar, and since they couldn't find one, he had not made a valid request for counsel, and so they were free to continue to interrogate him without one, and not be in violation of his rights?
Or how about SCOTUS ruling that in order to invoke your right to remain silent, you actually have to state that you are doing so specifically, and that merely remaining silent doesn't mean you are ... remaining silent?
We have an epidemic of overly-textualist, conservative courts living in an alternate reality.
Now only are these people unreasonable, they strive to be as unreasonable as possible, in order to project their political will of stopping progressivism, whatever that may mean to them.
Plenty of them are in the business of stopping regulation purely for the sport of stopping regulation, meaning regardless of what the regulation is.
> If people originally signed up for your program in person, you can offer them the opportunity to cancel in person if they want to, but you can’t require it. Instead, you need to offer a way for people to cancel online or on the phone.
Nice. I canceled a service recently and I had to "continue to cancel" and click on other such "confirmations" such that I think I proceeded through 7-8 pages before my subscription was actually canceled. Truly manipulative and obtuse. That was Spotify btw. I should have recorded the process, as it was nearly comedic (if it weren't so hostile).
I still receive (paper!) letters semi regularly about subscribing after I cancelled. It was so hard to do too, cancelling my NYT subscription was a breeze in comparison.
I cancelled in May with their chatbox and not only was it hassle-free but instead of refunding the remaining pro rata portion of the year I got the entire year's subscription fee refunded without even asking for it.
Ahh, okay, glad to see they've updated the process. Previously you had to call and find your way through a maze of disinterested people putting you on hold.
I cancelled through the “sound very angry and know what charge back means” when I wrote to their customer service. That was years ago. I would likely resub when I can do so through Apple Store.
I'm so butthurt about NYT's treatment of me when I wanted to cancel that I won't even consider it through their iOS app, which would be a subscription controlled by Apple (and therefore trivial to cancel).
The NYT was the worst. Had to call them on the phone. The guy I was talking to offered progressively better deals, until he basically offered me a year for next to nothing. I was angry at that point and determined to cancel, and said "No, JUST CANCEL" and he laughed out loud at me. Instant, permanent never-a-NYT-customer again.
I often wonder how these companies predict the expected permanent loss of customers over time due to their tactics and factor that against the expected gain of wearing people down until they just keep paying.
Planet Fitness pisses me off just in that they require giving them your checking account number to sign up instead of accepting credit cards. The only excuse I've heard for why that's a legitimate decision is that "some people are rude and will cancel a credit card instead of just saying they want to cancel their membership." But given that Planet Fitness can immediately shut off access for that person's app/QR code the instant a payment gets rejected, I simply do not believe the number of cancelled credit cards they'd have to deal with justifies the security risk and hassle (and lock-in, like you said) that their solution causes.
The fact that even with the Black Card (any location) membership, you still have to be tied to one "home" location and can only manage your plan at that one location is also predatory. I've read stories of people calling into Planet Fitness corporate and eventually getting a customer service rep to cancel their plan (when the location refused to do so remotely), so it's not a limitation of their system and it's not a legal restriction, it's just another way they make it difficult to cancel.
I will mention, one loophole for at least getting around a bad Planet Fitness location (e.g. a manager pretending they're not receiving the cancellation form in the mail) is going to another location, having them transfer your membership there, and then cancelling with them. I've done the store-and-back thing for changing plans before, and the managers oftentimes don't care/are happy to help with it.
Perhaps they've changed their process, but I canceled my New York times subscription about 2 weeks ago was able to do it online with absolutely no problem. It was a very easy process. They did offer me much better deal when I tried to cancel but I still went through with it.
Not sure why you're downvoted they have multiple beg screens
and manipulative language. There might be worse overall like NYT making you contact support but Amazon is for sure "worst in class" in the category of services that can be cancelled online.
They took me for a year of student-prime during a brief time period (UI bug?) where there was a button that only asked if I wanted free shipping on the current order and didn't have any of the other normal language/links/... suggesting that I was subscribing to a service in the process. I don't think it's an accident that the default payment period was 1yr either.
Yeah Spotify removed one of my family members from my 5-person subscription (only using 3 slots) so I immediately cancelled my subscription and had to deal with a lot of manipulative tactics to not cancel. This kind of behaviour 1, shouldn't be legal and 2, shouldn't be rewarded. I have plenty of Spotify alternatives, so this kind of behavior ultimately signals a floundering company resorting to hacks.
The phone rep is almost easier, because all they can do is withhold their confirmation. So, I told the Sirius guy who I was and that they were no longer authorized to charge my card, hung up, and wrote a note in my files. Sirius charged me again, and I submitted a chargeback. Quick and easy.
Sirius were obnoxious when I didn't convert from free to paid, on a service I wasn't using. The number of times I got phone calls and emails from them ended up with me repeating to them that their behaviour was guaranteeing I would never use them, and would tell friends not to either.
I don't know how NYT has been handling cancellations in other states, but California has required companies to allow cancellations in the same form as sign ups for a few years (Sign up online requires the ability to cancel online too).
I was on phone support for a SaaS based company that did something similar. Massive pricing restructuring increasing 90% of accounts bill and they made you call in and wait on hold to cancel. This was 10 years ago, but the ruling is a welcome pro-consumer addition.
As much as I used to hate them, I've now gained an appreciation for PayPal for this kind of stuff. For when I don't want to give my credit card to yet another vendor to possibly be compromised, or manage a sketchy subscription, PayPal is a pretty good solution. I do prefer Apple, but not every subscription can be bought that way.
Sometimes, but not always. As long as the difference is not too significant, the control over the subscription is worth it to me. Some people don't like 'em, I get it, but when you stay primarily inside their ecosystem it does work pretty seamlessly for most things.
Yeah PayPal is pretty good here. There's a page that lists all your billing subscriptions and you can cancel them right there.
It's a shame credit cards don't offer the same thing (Chase is able to list them all but provides no contact information or ability to revoke authorization)
The two banks I use provide information about your subscriptions and allow you to cancel any of them with a click of a button. I'm not in the US though (relatively poor "global South"); sometimes it pays to get technology with a significant delay.
One of them can also create zero-cost virtual Visa Golds in a couple of minutes. If I need to use a really sketchy service, I simply create a throwaway card, put a bit of cash there, pay for what I need, and then delete the card.
Oh wow lol, is it not? That would be pretty disappointing. It was really frustrating how many pages of crap I had to navigate my way through, basically deciphering all possible permutations of "cancel", "continue to cancel" "yes I'm sure", all surrounded by extraneous crap I'm not interested in. How difficult the cancellation process is gives me even more motivation to refine my alternatives to their service, so I never have to subject myself to that crap again.
It would be great to see the FTC go against predatory subscription services like Adobe. I'm fuzzy on the exact details, but I think they promoted a yearly subscription that was meant to look like a monthly subscription, where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee. I'm not sure how these new rules affect them.
One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it. For example: if I go a full monthly billing cycle without watching Netflix then my subscription should automatically pause and allow me to resume it next time I log-in. There's a ton of money that gets siphoned off to parasitic companies just because people forget to cancel their subscriptions or because they're too busy dealing with life. It might not be viable for all companies, but there's definitely a lot of services where such a thing would be possible, given the huge number of customer analytics they collect. Maybe give people the option to disable such a pause feature if they're really determined to keep paying for a service. But a default where subscriptions automatically pause if you're not using them makes a lot of sense from a user perspective. Of course businesses would probably hate such a ruling because it means they can't scam as much easy money.
> One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it.
Cool idea, but probably tough to enforce what “using it” means. I could see companies start sending newsletters to customers and calling that engagement
> I think they promoted a yearly subscription that was meant to look like a monthly subscription, where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee. I'm not sure how these new rules affect them.
I don't think it's the same situation. What Adobe was doing was offering a yearly subscription, charged monthly. If you tried to cancel, it would ask for payment to either cover the rest of the sub or to cover the "savings" that the user had obtained by selecting an annual sub rather than a true monthly (can't remember what exactly it tried to charge). It was deceptive as hell, but it's probably not covered by this rule.
But the "its yearly with a cancellation fee" was not qualified in the sales information on the sign-up page. Maybe it was in the fine print.
Given that customers are quite used to a monthly fee is a monthly subscription model, it was disingenuous at best. Putting significant terms in the fine print doesn't exactly engender trust.
There is no fine print. It is extremely clear and obvious. If you see a term called "Annual paid monthly", 33% less expensive than a monthly option right above, what possible other interpretation can someone have?
I think they clarified it more recently, because the FTC is taking a separate action against them on this specific issue. I doubt there would have been much of an issue if it had been that clear in the first place.
A few years ago it still had the three options (monthly, annual billed monthly and annual prepaid) but didn't -- at least on the first page, though it did when you confirmed your transaction -- have the specific notice about an early termination fee. It still seemed like something where any rational person would ask themselves "what sort of idiot would pay 33% more for `monthly' when there's this no downside annual paid monthly thing? Got em!", but I guess there was some argument for being bamboozled.
But it is the way it is now for at least three+ years. People are still thinking they're beating the system.
Does it try to ensnare users trying to save some money now? Sure, it does. It offers some revenue planning for Adobe in return for a discount. The FTC is basically arguing that there shouldn't be such a discount.
This was ~8 years ago. I am fairly careful when signing up for services and subscriptions, having learned hard lessons when signing up for gym memberships in the 1900s.
In either case, my grounds for cancelling early really had nothing to do with the year-long case.
My grounds for cancelling is that the software didn't work. And I don't mean in some qualitative sense. The software would just crash when opening files or creating new files.
Adobe never held up their end of the bargain - providing functioning software.
Man, I remember when Amazon Prime first started, I signed up for the free trial to get free shipping on something. Of course, I forgot about it and didn’t cancel, but then I got an email from Amazon saying, “hey, you didn’t cancel your prime subscription but you also haven’t used it at all, so we are going to not charge you and cancel it for now. Here is how you easily restart your subscription if you end up needing it”
It was such a wonderful feeling that clearly impacted me so much I remember it some 20 years later. I gained SO MUCH loyalty to Amazon after that, and sure enough, I restarted my prime subscription a bit later when I got a better job and started ordering more stuff. They made so much more money off me because they sacrificed those few dollars for one month of my subscription fee to show me they weren’t just trying to make me forget to cancel.
Amazon today would never do that, of course, but man I think more companies should if they want long term, loyal, customers.
Early Amazon was pro-customer in a way that I think most people have forgotten. Maybe that was always the strategy? They were losing money for years, and maybe that was investing in the company, or maybe it was allowing really large losses to keep customers happy, planning all along to eventually clamp down when people were addicted. And here we are.
Their return rate is still pretty terrible, IIRC. I bet they are trying to cut that down. I still see a lot (and I mean a LOT) of obvious Amazon returns in the line at the UPS store, and some of them are quite egregious (I stood behind a lady for 5 solid minutes a couple weeks ago and she was pulling return after return out of a big bag). Maybe Amazon will start firing those customers.
The way Amazon was "losing money" in the early years was all intense reinvestment though so they could at any point pretty easily tune their profit making by turning down the ridiculous amount of warehouses they were building for one example.
I think it's more a matter of companies just having different focuses. If you're wondering how to grow your userbase, you're thinking fundamentally differently than if you have an established one and are wondering how to monetize them.
Or maybe it's all one cycle with different phases? Not saying you did this, but is this a technique one uses to distract or diffuse a critical attack - break a system into parts and claim the parts are unconnected?
Anyways to the above, e.g. spider spins it's web, attracts the prey, mummifies, etc.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply that it's unconnected, just that they're at different places. You're right that it's almost certainly just parts of one common cycle.
> Early Amazon was pro-customer in a way that I think most people have forgotten.
I think this is why I'm still such a loyal customer, and use Amazon for so many purchases. Intellectually I know that Amazon does super crappy things, both to their workers and around their website and sales. But I've been a Prime member since it was first offered, nearly 20 years now, and I still fondly remember when Amazon's customer service was pretty much better than anyone else's out there. It was actually delightful to interact with their customer service, which was (and is) so rare.
Interestingly, I actually still have only had great experiences with Amazon customer service. I have a feeling that is entirely due to how much my family continues to spend with them, though. It is pretty well known that their customer service response to things varies with how much your spend.
The customer service is a margins game, and you are correct that they ratio spend to returns to track those margins per account.
The service degradation is in terms of search no longer being useful, promoted/ad brands everywhere, popup 'businesses' with co-mingled inventory, fake reviews, just general lack of trust earning. Amazon used to be THE place to get the cheapest option too, but that is rarely the case these days.
> Early Amazon was pro-customer in a way that I think most people have forgotten. Maybe that was always the strategy? They were losing money for years, and maybe that was investing in the company, or maybe it was allowing really large losses to keep customers happy, planning all along to eventually clamp down when people were addicted. And here we are.
Yup. This is the playbook of the Enshittification[1] process as coined by Cory Doctorow.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Egregious? The policy is literally "free returns". In my experience, they could cut it down a lot by not constantly playing pricing games and also getting rid of their slow spiteful shipping. Like if I'm in the market for a type of thing, and they have one of their sale days where two or three options are all 30% off, I'll order a few options and then decide later. Or if I'm in the middle of project I'll order extra parts that I merely might need so that I don't get interrupted waiting for another shipping round (especially if I don't currently have a "trial" of their sunk cost fallacy program). If I already have to do an Amazon return sometime, then taking more items is basically free. I know their system is wasteful as fuck, but that's on them for setting up such terrible policies. I'm certainly not going to validate the business model of letting companies cheat customers based on making us feel bad about how much they waste. (all the repeatedly damaged items from Target having no clue how how to pack items is another example that spelled out this larger dynamic for me. at least Target lets you keep the salvage much of the time)
Back when people were suspicious of buying things online, Amazon used to set a percentage in the low double digits, of revenue they assumed would be lost to refunds.
That allowed an amazing customer service experience, and immense trust: if there was an issue with your order that couldn’t be easily fixed, then we’re very sorry, and here’s your money back.
Both that program and the incentive for it are long gone.
This is textbook enshitification: Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
Reddit is following the same pattern. Entice everyone over from digg, make users happy and grow base, appeal to businesses, then squeeze the business (API changes). Chrome used to be the faster, cleaner, more 'techie' option, and they too have departed from Day1 and moved into the squeeze.
Of course that’s the strategy. It’s called enshitifcation. Cory Doctorow coined the term and has many cool examples like this in his related speeches and blog posts.
I got mine two days ago, with no reminder. When I went in to the Account page, the "Notify me by email 3 days prior to renewal" was unchecked. While possible, I can't imagine a scenario where I'd have ever knowingly unchecked that.
Let me regale you with the story of my Adobe Subscription cancellation.
I had been considering learning Illustrator and to align myself, I decided to get a little skin the game. I signed up for the "monthly" subscription. I downloaded Illustrator, and this screenshot was my entire experience:
Suffice it to say, this didn't meet my expectations. I thus decided to cancel and was presented with a $108 cancellation fee.
Boo.
I hit up customer service and explained my frustration. I was told that I was going to pay that $108 since I agreed to it. I countered that contracts required consideration and since Adobe had provided no consideration for my valuable cash, no contract had been perfected betwixt us. He was unwilling to see my point. I asked for his contact information for follow-up, which he provided. I then explained to him that after I hung up, I was not only NOT going to pay, but that within 60 days Adobe would cancel the subscription voluntarily on their side and not collect a single further dime from me.
His response basically amounted to "good luck with that."
So, I got a temporary prepaid credit card number with $5 on it and swapped out the CC on file with Adobe.
I then went over to Amazon and spent that $5. Who knows on what.
A month goes by, turns out $0 is insufficient for a monthly subscription payment. I get a notice that the balance isn't good. I get several more notices.
Then I get a notice that if I don't pay, I'll lose access. At about 60 days, they cancelled the subscription. I took a screen shot and emailed it to the CSR's contact with my "I told you so" scrawled on it.
I never heard back, but in my mind it was a great victory. Tickertape and swooning ladies.
I thought he was just going to say he did a chargeback, with how the first seven paragraphs went. What he described was not ideal for several reasons:
- Some websites won't accept prepaid cards (largely because they can be used to get around things like this).
- Who knows if a platform's going to save your previous card info to use as a fallback?
- As another reply stated, the company can send you to collections if they think you owe them money. They can also do that if you do a chargeback, theoretically. However, with a chargeback, your card company did some basic checking of the situation and agreed with you that something was wrong about the payment, so assuming you win the chargeback, you've at least had a second pair of eyes on the case, and you have that tiny bit of metaphorical "precedent" to use if you take the collections order to court-- both of which also mean they're less likely to take you to collections. If you just swap out your card number for one that doesn't work, that shifts some of the shadiness to your end, and it legally appears less like you have any grounds to stand on.
If I recall, the problem was that they were refusing to cancel the subscription unless I paid the cancellation fee.
My argument was that while I may have agreed to the cancellation fee in the fine print, they contract was not perfected because they never provided consideration.
The software would not work on my computer.
My grounds for cancelling the software wasn't that I wanted to cancel early, I was satisfied with a year-long subscription. My grounds for cancelling was that the software simply didn't work. It crashed when opening AI files are creating new files.
IIRC the trick with Adobe is to cancel on the web site, and when it says "but, but, how about this great upgrade?" you say yes, and then you can cancel your 'new' plan during its introductory period.
Maybe they closed that loophole, but it did used to work not that long ago.
Great story, but you should be careful with this method if you care about your credit. They are arguably within their rights to report this to the credit agencies as an unpaid debt and send it to collections, including the cancellation fee since they can point to the clickwrap contract that states it.
This is a great story, but I'd like to also point out that it shows why the popular trend of only blaming a company's top management for that company's terrible behavior is wrong: many people have a tendency to want to sympathize with the lowest-level workers at a company, saying "they're only doing their jobs and have no say in business decisions" when interacting with customer service personnel. As you can see here, many (if not the vast majority) of these low-ranking foot soldiers are sociopathic assholes who really believe the corporate BS and are happy to do their utmost to screw over customers. It's not just the higher-up managers or CxOs, though they usually set the direction.
> One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it.
That seems a bit fuzzy to implement, depending on what the service actually does. It's not always clear-cut, like watching a show on a streaming service; for example, what if the service does things in the background for the user too even if they're not actively 'using' it.
My compromise would be something like: if the user hasn't actively engaged with your service for X month(s), email/text them a reminder asking if they still want to be subscribed.
While the Adobe thing is the common punching bag, I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that people probably need to either be more honest, or need to pay more attention.
When you subscribe there are three prices given-
Monthly, Annual paid monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual paid monthly very clearly indicates that there is a fee if you cancel after 14 days. The annual paid monthly is some 33% less expensive than monthly, with the downside that you're committing for a year, or to pay a termination fee if you cancel early.
This has been extremely clear for years. Like you have to be blind to not see a "Monthly" that costs much more at the top, then one called "Annual billed monthly" and not have paused to do some diligence.
Adobe does a lot of shady stuff, but on this topic we seem to hear the most from careless, thoughtless, or selfish people who think they figured out how to game the system. Kind of like the "my laptop got stolen out of my car and it had the only copy of all of my important documents and the doctoral thesis I've been working on for seven years" stories, at some point we have to not be so naive with people's foolishness.
> I'm going to play devil's advocate and say that people probably need to either be more honest, or need to pay more attention.
Neither the Devil nor Adobe need an advocate, but maybe you could help Adobe out with the Justice Department law suit around subscription dark patterns[1]? That signup page you took a screen shot of is the current version, older ones had more dark patterns and definitely were not as clear, hence the Justice Department law suit.
Page 8 from the complaint. Precisely the same disclaimers and selections.
Adobe has used this same format for three+ years. And no, the FTC filing a complaint -- responding to people doing the "woe am I...I am the victim for my carelessness" doesn't mean it has merit. Something got some congresspeople's to complaint to the FTC so they did something. And Adobe will probably just abolish discounting to make them go away.
I think the fact that they don't tell you the fee upfront is mischevious enough.
> or need to pay more attention.
This is such a common and pointless argument. Here's the thing -- people don't pay attention to everything because who's got the energy for that. Companies know and capitalize.
Why don't you start by telling drivers and pedestrians to start paying attention when they drive on roads. When you've slashed car accident and casualty numbers in half, you can come back and tell us how asking people to pay more attention solves everything :)
> One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it
Amazon got me on this multiple times for prime, now I always pay for delivery directly, because in the long run it's cheaper.
The most recent incarnation of their cancel subscription page had such intentionally shitty UX that I thought I had cancelled, but there were more pages to click through. So I ended up paying 2 months for zero usage. I'm fed up with the never ending changing landscape of tricks. Fuck subscriptions.
> where if you cancelled early they would charge you an exorbitant cancellation fee.
I'm currently in the process of de-Adboe'ing my life because of the subscription model.
It's not htat you get charged an exorbitant cancellation fee, per se. It's that, from Adobe's point of view, you entered into a year-long contract. And so if you want to cancel after 3 months, the only option they give you is to pay for the rest of the entire year upfront.
This has a lot of artists really pissed off and many are saying they're finally done with Adobe.
Fortunately, I think we're finally in an era where Adobe doesn't actually offer the best products anyway.
For Photoshop I'm playing with Affinity Photo. It has a six month free trial and after playing with it for a couple of months I think I'm going to pay for it when the trial is up. And it's a flat fee / perpetual license.
I've been playing around with Inkscape as a FOSS alternative to Illustrator and it's OK. I might give the Affinity Designer trial a go since I'm enjoying Affinity Photo.
For video editing Davinci Resolve is so far ahead of Premiere that it makes me wonder why Premiere is still used by anyone regardless of other considerations. What's bonkers is that BlackMagic gives the standard version of Resolve away for free... and I have yet to find myself needing features that are in the paid Studio version.
It has its own FX tool called Fusion built-in, so After Effects also gets replaced by Resolve.
I never used Adobe Animate but am starting to get into 2D animation and really like Moho Pro. It's not free but it has a perpetual license and apparently the first version of this software was created for BeOS 30 years ago, and then got ported to Windows and Mac as AnimeStudio... so it's been around forever, has a cool history and is starting to get used by a lot of pro studios since it gives you 3D style rigging for 2D / "cutout" animation which was its killer feature for me.
Anyway Adobe is one of the largest companies in the world but I suspect big changes are coming in a few years because I can't think of any reason to buy into Creative Cloud in current year ... like not a single reason. Maybe if you've got some PSD files laying around that can't be opened in alternatives like Affinity Photo because they take advantage of very specialized features or something then you might be screwed but I haven't ran into any issues opening my old PSD files in Affinity.
Companies are less shy about paying for recurring licenses because it's easier for them. No need to worry about keeping track of a perpetual license that a former employee purchased or having too many unused seats for a network license. Once a year, the license admin pays the bill (and potentially updates the network licenses) and it's all good until next year. License payments can be billed to individual departments. Perpetual licenses could be considered capital assets that depreciate where as a recurring license is an expense. This could make a huge difference on the company books. Additionally you can't sell a perpetual license when you don't need it anymore but you can just stop paying for a recurring license.
> Additionally you can't sell a perpetual license when you don't need it anymore
You make some good points but I'm not sure that this generalization really holds. It will depend on the terms of the license but I have heard of buying, selling & trading software licenses (at least on an individual basis, it might be harder for companies to do that).
They should clean up their act anyway. If other customers are like me I’ve been putting off joining for over a year because they’re so scammy and I don’t want to get locked in.
I even went to sign up and walked out because the price ended up being double what they advertised with weird fees and the base plan not being useable once they explain it.
Conversely there is a gym in my town that was a month to month subscription with moments notice cancellation. They'd even pro-rate your remaining time back to you. I ended up joining and cancelling those gyms a lot through college years, but I'm much more willing to rejoin if it was easy to cancel.
If you setup a "payment agreement" between yourself, the gym (or any similar service), and your credit card, you should be able to cancel that agreement and the subsequent services that agreement entailed through your credit card. The byzantine and manipulative things that gyms do are, in part, because we basically let them control the cancellation process.
It may be different now, but Planet Fitness used to ONLY allow you to set up ACH payments (e.g. bank routing and account number) and then only allow you to cancel in person. You can't dispute because it's ACH.
I asked about cancellation policies before joining and when I found out about the mail in cancellation policy I literally laughed in their faces and walked out. It's obvious abuse.
I agree. In Australia we have much better banking than the US (instant free transfers between all banks), but you still can't cancel a recurring payment thru your bank like that. I had trouble cancelling a gym earlier this year.
When I lived in the UK and I wanted to cancel my gym, not only can you cancel the recurring payment thru your bank app, but the gym's website said that's how you should cancel.
If you can sign up for the gym online, then you need to be able to cancel online. That's how this rule is meant to work for all kinds of merchants. Gyms would still be free to pull their usual car-salesman shenanigans on cancellation if they're willing to only take new subscriptions on location and not online, too.
print off the form, get it notarized, sprinkle it with essence of rose, put your signature, thumbprint, and a skin sample to prove your identity, sing songs to the machine god to empower its cancellation abilities, send through registered mail to an address antarctica, and follow up with form 2 and a similar process within one month.
I cancelled my membership at 24 Hours Fitness back in the early 2000s. They informed me that because of how their system works it can take a few weeks to process the cancelation and I will get charged for another month. This is such BS and obviously a scam. When the charge appeared on my credit card, I just disputed it with evidence of cancelation and that was that.
LA Fitness wanted me to mail something to their headquarters, which was intentionally onerous. I filed a complaint with BBB and cc'd LA Fitness on them, and they ended up cancelling it for me.
Still, I did originally sign up for the gym in person, so I wonder if they'd be allowed to force the person to come back in person to cancel. This still seems like too much work, especially for when people move.
Gyms are so damn scummy with this. When I cancelled my last gym membership due to moving I had to show them that there would be no nearby gyms of that brand where I was moving in order to let me cancel.
It seems like all this sketchiness actually hurts these companies. I do ten times more subscriptions when I can go through apple and know I can cancel in 5 seconds.
The worst part is it poisons the whole business model for me. Even if your company could restrain itself from these tactics I won't know that until it is to late and even if I did research it there isn't any reason it couldn't change to be awful from being OK. The end result is I turn my nose at the very idea because subscription services are fine with me as an idea but in practice I just don't want to waste the energy dealing with them.
For every "you" avoiding subscriptions, there's an idiot like me who has had several $5-10/mo. subscriptions for years because I keep hitting the "call customer service to cancel" wall and procrastinating.
It absolutely does. I got bit by the NYT back when they had call-to-cancel, and I won't subscribe to any company that doesn't have an unsubscribe button. I just search "bla company unsubscribe," and if it's call to cancel, I won't subscribe.
> Is this a real problem? I don't have one subscription service that I can't "click to cancel".
After 16,000 public comments, and 70 consumer complaints per day on average, up from 42 per day in 2021, the idea is that FTC made the rule for an imaginary problem?
You don't have to be snarky. I have never experienced a service I couldn't cancel online. I didnt realize it was a problem. And yes, the government attempts to solve imaginary problems everyday.
To put into perspective how awful this problem actually is, I signed up for planet fitness 100% online.
I went to the gym and well, it sucked. So then I want to cancel.
Okay I go to the front desk. Can I cancel? No. They tell me to read the website.
Okay I go to the website. It says "well... this varies gym to gym".
Okay I call my gym "... yeah we can't cancel, you have to send a formal letter to HQ"
A letter? Really?
As a matter of coincidence, my card gets lost, stolen, and used. So I cancel.
Finally, I think, it's over.
No, I still get charges on my bank account from planet fitness. So I wrote a letter, mailed it, and then like 6 weeks later (so... another payment later) it's cancelled.
For future reference, if any company does still require this sort of byzantine process and you want a quick resolution, the magic words "Certified Mail" strike fear into 99% of companies and will get them to act in days upon receipt rather than months. Even a company-appointed arbiter will respect the USPS certification stamp.
I once moved towns and needed to cancel my LA Fitness gym membership. I found that they wanted me to go to their website, find the Cancellation Form, print it out, fill it out with my account details, and mail or fax it to their corporate office. I don’t believe there is any way of cancelling it online or over the phone.
So instead of doing that all of that, I called my credit card company and asked them to block all future charges from the company. It worked like a charm.
It is up to the company to not pursue you for the money. Contractually, you probably still owe them the money, unless there is a clause in the contract that says that non-payment is a way to cancel the membership. They could legally pursue that, or sell it to someone else to pursue.
Not paying is not the same thing as not owing. Many companies will just let it drop. Some won't
Eh it's probably not enforceable so long as you did something reasonable— sent a letter, sent an email and then stopped payment.
Taken to absurdity they can't make you lick your elbow in order to cancel and making you jump through arbitrary hoops when an email to their support is perfectly sufficient probably falls on your side.
The something reasonable is almost certainly going to be explicitly defined in the contract that you sign (terms and conditions).
If one of the conditions is that you can't cancel without showing up in person or sending a notarized letter and giving 90 days notice, courts would find that enforceable if that's what you agreed to. Many online services will just allow you to cancel by stopping payment, many won't. That's why regulations like this are important, sleazy companies, like gyms and Adobe, are great at burying terms deep in their terms that are just on the right side of legally enforceable, but not reasonable to a normal person. The courts have to go with precedent and the law, even when it isn't 'common sense'.
If there isn't a prior contract or you never signed a terms and conditions, then sure, just stop payment, but almost any business is going to have a contract.
Past canceling, there are so many problems with subscription programs. Too many products are unusable without a subscription that offer no additional value. Or disabling the subscription cripples product features that have no dependency on the remote service. Or they can 'alter the deal' at any point where what you get for what you pay can change despite the fact the product hasn't.
Ideally 'the market' would punish such companies but it seems to do the opposite in that once a dark pattern becomes mainstream, everyone quickly adopts it, and consumers don't really get any real choices.
When people buy an app on the app store they kind of expect it to work in perpetuity. This would be fine, but the environment changes and people still expect it to keep working. It is reasonable to expect an app I bought on my iPhone 4 using iOs 4 (or whatever it was) to work in perpetuity on that phone and that OS. It is less reasonable to expect it to run on my iPhone 16 on iOs 18, but that is what people expect.
The other thing that app stores did was dramatically lower the price point of software. In 2000, you could go to the store and expect to pay $50+ for an "app". Now, $9.99 is considered a higher price point, and we expect it to be maintained in perpetuity.
Given those constraints, a subscription model is actually pretty reasonable.
Add in that the investors in many companies are hyper focused on MRR, and subscriptions are the only viable way for a startup to work.
Sure but that $50 app works in perpetuity. Back when I did uni IT one of my professors was still using their ~20 year old version of WordPerfect. I still have a copy of Office 2003 that works. They can pry my Adobe CS6 license from my cold dead hands.
So I think you're right it's App Stores but for the reason that they force indefinite maintenance on developers.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadCalifornia's 'click to cancel' subscription bill is signed into law
https://www.engadget.com/general/californias-click-to-cancel...
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/09/24/governor-newsom-signs-cons...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/10/click-can...
Cannot you just go to random gym, pay for enterance and do ya thing without signing stuff?
In eastern eu I just enter the gym and purchase daily or monthly ticket
Just like train ticket
There's only a few types of gyms where most of the members actually use the gym, and although they're still subscription based, they have entirely different business models.
He left and is now working for a company that actually wants its customers to use its product more.
"Pizza Fridays!"
"Judgement free zone!"
"No lunks in here! Lunk alarm!"
They know the demographic they are shooting for.
Most gyms I've been to do not allow local residents to purchase 1-day passes.
They do often allow people visiting (on business etc.) to purchase a daily or weekly pass. But may need your ID to prove that, and you can only do that so many times. Like if you visit for two weeks once a year they're happy to. If you come once a month for business, you're gonna need a full membership.
And you've always gotta sign stuff no matter what. For liability, so they know who to contact if you keel over on the treadmill, and so forth.
The alternative I've commonly seen is they do offer a day pass, but it's basically the cost of an entire month to go even one time, while also making it extremely inconvenient by having to sign a bunch of forms every single time you go. This makes it so nobody except maybe a tourist/non-local would ever consider this option.
Seems silly to just accept virtually un-cancellable terms.
They will just continue attempting to collect money as per the contract you signed, and then send you bill to collections when they can't.
Edit: Credit card companies typically require/ask you to dispute with the merchant and attempt to do get a refund first before they will chargeback. If you try, and the gym can point to contract, you'll lose the dispute either way. Getting your credit card number changed stops the gym from charging you, but you'll still owe them money and you'll typically find out when you start getting calls from a collections agency.
It's not "blaming the consumers" for expecting people to follow the terms of contracts they sign. I never had a Gold's Gym membership for exactly this reason - their cancellation terms were onerous, I wasn't interested in complying, so I never signed and never gave them any money.
If you say "well, I don't want to do that, but I'm just going to sign this anyway then do a chargeback because that's easier" them yes, you deserve to be blamed, you deserve to be shamed, and you should have to pay the cancellation fees, early termination fees, whatever.
I'm comfortable with taking on the risk of not fulfilling my end of something like a gym contract, provided the mechanism to remove third parties like payment processors.
You can also just pay as you go, i.e. per visit but that ends up being a lot more expensive.
There's at least some hope of decency and empathy in an individual person empowered to override process prescription even if there will never be any in the dark patterns dreamed up by the corporate-level customer retention team.
As coldpie said:
> Remember this when you're going to vote. Elections matter.
(high empathy justice sensitive human)
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/holyoak-dissent...
It's a dark-pattern underhanded dirty trick when you don't.
Her basic points are:
1. The FTC doesn't have the authority to make this rule, and in government there must be a hard line between "I want this" and "this is legal" unless you want a dictatorship.
2. The reason the FTC has so many Congressionally-enacted laws to follow is because of a history of overstepping its legal authority. The more they push the boundary, the less authority the FTC will have in the long-run.
3. The rule is too broad. Broad regulation is bad because it leaves too much legal wiggle-room for violators with deep pockets and smart lawyers. At the same time, small businesses who may be acting legitimately can't know they'll be accused of violating overly broad rules, or afford to defend themselves if they draw government scrutiny.
4. The FTC has a specific procedure it needs to follow for making a rule but they didn't follow that procedure.
5. Because of the above, the rule will be challenged by BigCo and struck down in court, wasting time and harming the FTC's reputation.
I'm hopeful about a "Click to Cancel" future (who wouldn't be?) but it's pretty hard to dismiss those points as "typical pro-business grift".
Mindsets like this are actually why democracies fail.
In that case, why have a state government? Why not have everything determined county-by-county?
In fact, why have it be county rule? Why not just neighborhood by neighborhood?
You place the locus of control according to the problems you need to solve. Neighborhoods combine to cities combine to counties combine to states combine to countries in order to be competitive and thrive against the broader environment. Yes, it does typically entail a loss of autonomy, but the benefit is that your little independent enclave doesn't get taken over by the next-strongest neighbor.
It seems like you don't understand how checks and balances work in our system.
In the context of this concrete discussion, allowing customers to cancel contracts they don't want - that's something which you object to because you want companies to be allowed to keep taking your money against your will, because consent matters to you? That is obviously self-inconsistent.
Because we aren't a unitary democracy, we are a federal republic that was built upon the idea of a limited federal government designed to address pressing national issues, with "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The will of the people state should almost always be superior to the will of the federal government. There needs to be an exceedingly pressing and relevant reason that any law, let alone one made by unelected bureaucrats, should overrule any of a state's laws. There is no exceedingly pressing reason the federal government should be involving itself in the process of canceling an auto renewing contract.
>"why is it okay that people should have to vote on whether others can prey on them, exploit and abuse them"
A company making it slightly annoying to leave an agreement with them is not being preyed on, exploited, or abused. That kind of language to describe "sitting on the phone longer than I want to cancel my paper subscription" or similar is bordering on histrionic.
Are you saying this because you believe it, or because the Constitution says so?
I think rote but beneficial consumer protections in the digital age is something that fits well at a national level. We don't need a 50-state laboratory on how to handle SiriusXM.
Oh, and making it artificially difficult for laypeople to get out of subscription contracts is absolutely predatory.
This is replying to an objection about forests by saying "how could one object to a single leaf?". This other comment by someone else describes it well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41875283
Company behaviour is sociopathic psychological manipulation. Having to legally force companies to let you leave - if that was a personal relationship that you couldn't leave without the government forcing your partner to let you out of it, it would be an abusive one.
Really, of all the places to get worked up about the 10th amendment, a clear-cut, low-risk, low-intrusion expansion of consumer protection is a weird one.
My argument is different. There should not be any regulation except where existentially necessary (e.g. you need government to manage an army, because otherwise someone else will conquer the country, this sort of thing).
Sure, most rules sound good in isolation. But in aggregate you end up with huge administration and 50% marginal tax rate and massive regulatory burden to businesses. Not able to cancel a subscription easily after you willingly enter into a relationship with some business is too tiny an issue to merit expanding the government monster.
Only thing that comes to mind is like de facto parts of Mexico, maybe Somalia?
That can't be true... people exist there. Turns out your heuristic is no more defensible than anyone else's: I want the government to provide precisely the services I want.
So in your world, I have to protect my credit card details from all evil people in the world forever (and also somehow prevent them from acquiring companies that I've previously given my details to), because it's okay for a company to keep charging my credit card forever, even if I don't want or use the service.
This is pretty much an argument for legalizing theft.
You know this isn't a legal way to terminate a contractual agreement with a company, right?
No, also not a legal method to terminate a contract.
Government shouldn't enforce contract law, got it. Sounds like utopia.
What? Why is that defensible? Make life worse/keep life bad for Americans so we have a better chance in an election? Do you hear yourself?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41626251
Short answer is that you're just not paying attention.
I would recommend reading the newsletter "Big" by Matt Stoller for context.
Lina Khan seems widely hated across the aisle, so that's a good first step.
The SEC has also taken unprecedented actions under Rohit Chopra.
On what basis do you make the accusation that the administration has been sandbagging their own policy changes?
> It is also hardly one of the most pressing election issues.
Let's just send Lina Khan to Ukraine and get this problem squared away I guess
One of the people who voted against it explained why and it has nothing to do with wanting to make cancellations harder. But we can't acknowledge that truth because that goes against the "one side is good, one side is bad" narrative so many here try to push so often and so hard.
It would be similar to going into an israel-palestine war thread and saying that "remember, if you vote Biden you're voting for a president that is enabling a genocide" or saying that "those bombs were given by Biden's administration " whenever a hospital gets hit in that war. Is it true? Sure. Is it stirring the pot? Absolutely. Do people who vote for Biden already know that and don't really care? Almost certainly.
The exact same applies to comments like this. Like yes, republicans vote for Republican candidates knowing this. It's not like they weren't aware that the party they support leans heavily towards favoring business interests.
This won't be the case in California, but I've observed this in both Indiana and Texas. I haven't subscribed to the local paper here in NC, because I can tell at a glance that it's the same company and I've already had to dealt with their shenanigans twice.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/holyoak-dissent...
It's like asking whether Congress has the power to enact laws now that judicial review is a thing
While I wouldn't be totally surprised to see this argument, Commissioner Holyoak's dissenting statement doesn't raise it. Instead she purports 1) the FTC didn't properly follow the rule making requirements and 2) the rule is overbroad.
I don't believe this is accurate, as you stated
>The overturning of Chevron deference enables the judiciary to first find that the FTC's authority for this rule is grounded in an ambiguous statute and then decide the FTC went beyond their authority.
The only thing the SCOTUS can do is rule against the agency for exceeding its congressional authority. They aren't substituting their own expertise. Correct me if I'm wrong.
The plain reading of Loper Bright is that the courts should make their own independent interpretation of the statutory provisions. In doing so the court can ignore the agency’s expertise.
That is what Roberts' conclusion wants it to sound like but he claims a lot more power for the courts than the statement implies.
> In an agency case as in any other, though, even if some judges might (or might not) consider the statute ambiguous, there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the court would have reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron, 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. It therefore makes no sense to speak of a “permissible” interpretation that is not the one the court, after applying all relevant interpretive tools, concludes is best. In the business of statutory interpretation, if it is not the best, it is not permissible.
In other words, the judiciary has final say on the "best reading" of a statute and all other readings definitionally exceed the authority granted by the statute.
> They aren't substituting their own expertise.
examples of Chevron questions that are now up to the judiciary to identify the "single, best meaning", independently of agency interpretation:
> the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological product[s],” including “protein[s].” When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a “protein”?
> What makes one population segment “distinct” from another? Must the Service treat the Washington State population of western gray squirrels as “distinct” because it is geographically separated from other western gray squirrels?
I find it exceptionally hard to imagine an answer to either of those questions that don't require a judge to exercise their own chemistry or biology expertise, however limited that may be.
My expectation is a case will quickly be brought in the Northern District of Texas, they'll rule it unlawful (following Commissioner Holyoak's lead), then it'll get bumped up to the 5th Circuit on appeal and they'll issue a stay.
I don't expect to see this rule take affect anytime soon, if ever.
SCOTUS' power/respect only goes as far as they're actually listening to the will of Americans. This is not representing Americans if they override. Same for abortion (just legality not anything about enforcement), same for presidential immunity.
We have expectations, and they do not align with SCOTUS, so SCOTUS is not a valid interpretive institution. "The Supreme Court has made their decision, let's see them enforce it."
And against my best judgement, I’ll add that in it was roe v wade itself that was essentially judges creating law (shoehorning abortion rights into a right to privacy is a stretch).
You call out yourself that the judges are essentially creating law. (presidential immunity and abortion both are just bonkers decisions based on thoughts and feelings). I think the only way to curb that from the supreme court is that the other governing body capable of action (see not congress) needs to remind SCOTUS that they've got finite power.
Do you have another alternative here? Maybe more ethics rules that SCOTUS doesn't have to follow? Wait for congress to impeach a sitting justice for corruption? Hopes and prayers?
The main difference is that now unelected judges decide how to interpret the law instead of unelected administrative officials. But that's what judges do.
What this is really about is that nobody wants to get blamed for what happens. So Congress passes purposely ambiguous laws and then deflects blame onto the courts for interpreting them one way or the other. The courts didn't like that so they said they'd defer to administrative agencies. It turns out the administrative agencies did like that, because they have almost no direct accountability and the only elected ticket in the executive branch has a term limit and frequently switches parties, so it was easy for them to participate in the revolving door and line their pockets.
Now the courts are going to go back to doing their job, so naturally now they get the blame for Congress passing ambiguous laws again, and the people profiting from the status quo are railing against it as if the courts are doing something wrong instead of doing what they ought to have been doing the whole time.
Yeah, but they could've overturned it if they didn't like it.
> The main difference is that now unelected judges decide how to interpret the law instead of unelected administrative officials. But that's what judges do.
This is a huge difference you kinda skip over. Should the policies and regulations of 100s of industries be decided by:
1. People who are only familiar with court proceedings 2. Experts in those industries with experience in those industries
One of those things is meaningfully worse, because we're going to get a ton of "armchair experts" on culture war issues who have no idea about what's happening on the ground, and just have their own culture-war opinion that ignores the nuance of the situation.
The question is if they could've passed it to begin with. There is nothing in the constitution giving Congress the power to delegate its lawmaking authority to the executive branch, much less deprive the courts of their interpretive role.
> Should the policies and regulations of 100s of industries be decided by:
> 1. People who are only familiar with court proceedings 2. Experts in those industries with experience in those industries
The first one is actually better, because it makes it harder for the industry to capture the decisionmakers. Meanwhile the experts are still in the court, they just have to argue their case before the judge instead of having the parties argue their case before the "experts" with a sack of cash.
Source ? Asking as a non American
It seems to me there are multiple understanding of the role of scotus in general and the inoperative rules of the constitution. "Explicitly not supposed to represent the will of the people" seems to be one perspective but not the only one.
Every constitutional democraty will have a tension between the constitutional and democratic part. And that tension will be felt in all of its institutiona
I disagree fundamentally, but this is where the textualists and others diverge. I absolutely believe our fundamental rights extend to the modern era.
The "modern era" part comes from the majority opinion of Roe, which notes that abortion was viewed in a much better light when the constitution was written. Anti-abortion sentiment is a fairly modern phenomenon.
“It is thus apparent that at common law, at the time of the adoption of our Constitution, and throughout the major portion of the 19th century, abortion was viewed with less disfavor than under most American statutes currently in effect.”
In terms of the history I have not dug into it but there seems to be conflicting arguments based on your priors. It doesn't seem cut and dry enough to just say it was a right then so it is now, if it was why not just do that instead of the whole privacy deal?
From Dobbs majority opinion: "English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century corroborate the treaties' statements that abortion was a crime."
I am also skeptical of origionalism. I don't know how much bearing 13-18th century common law should have on modern day law, especially when there was assuredly a diverse set of opinions on abortion just like today. Why shouldn't the 20th century have the same amount of weight as the 18th?
To me it seems that even if you believe abortion is morally right Roe was legislating from the bench. These things should come from congress not the supreme court.
An unborn fetus has never been granted rights in our constitution or anywhere else. It does not have personhood. There is only then one person here: the owner of the body.
> Abusing your spouse
This doesn't work, because your spouse has personhood and therefore rights.
To be clear, this has never been solved by any courts in the US. We still do not consider the unborn to be American citizens with individual personhood. The Supreme Court decided that's hard, so they just didn't do it when Roe was overturned. They essentially "carved out" an exception to privacy for exactly one-use case - Abortion.
You can certainly drink while pregnant. You can certainly smoke while pregnant. Because that is your body and your right, and you are exactly one person. None of that has changed from a legal standpoint. Now, you are one person with every right to privacy... except one.
I think, if you wish to ban abortion, you have to start at the core issue - who is considered a person, and who isn't? WHEN does an arrangement of cells become coherent enough to be considered a person? The reason nobody wants to answer this is because it's very hard, and there's a lot of unfortunate implications.
Then the Supreme Court "cheated", in my opinion.
> These things should come from congress not the supreme court
They already did come from Congress, when Congress passed the 14th amendment, in my opinion.
The problem is, they have to, to a certain point. All government institutions ultimately derive their power from the willingness of the governed to live by their laws. Most decisions are minor enough and stacked with enough legalese that the average American doesn't care, but when you have more and more decisions that are as far out of right-field as the recent court has been making and corrupt justices making those decisions, it erodes the willingness of people to live under those decisions as time goes on.
> (shoehorning abortion rights into a right to privacy is a stretch).
I mean, only if you want the government telling twelve-year-olds that they'll need to push a baby out of a pelvis that is not yet wide enough to safely give birth.
The idea of "privacy" in this context is that generally speaking, it's not the government's business what you do with your body while knowingly and consensually under the care of a doctor. That is private for purposes of what the government can tell you to do. Maybe "confidentiality" would be a better term for the court to have used, but it's not a completely weird term.
But the rules I'm thinking of are more about Roe V. Wade, which don't make sense in their interpretation of the laws.
It also goes to the heart of the arbitrariness of the rulings if they can overturn previous precedent 'just because they want to' which is a lot of the logic of the rulings.
Brown v. Board is famous for not just overturning the precedent, but for giving a reasonable understanding of the precedent was meaningfully unfair in the previous setup.
And the courts are not supposed to represent the “will of the people”. Law is not a popularity contest.
In practice abolishing Chevron deference mostly means rules will follow the politics of judges rather than the current administration. TBH I think this rule is far enough from the culture war that it will probably stand anyway. Unless the NYT happens to buy the judges a lot of vacations...
I want to agree with you but the vote was split down party lines completely with 2 dissenters being republican.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Federal...
Internet services are not excluded, but you have to make the subscription online (from a library computer, GSM network or previous Internet Subscription for example).
Oh, even if it's mandatory, doesn't mean it's easy. "Free" and "Orange" (French ISPs) hide the "cancellation link" (Résiliation in french) in the footer of the home page and never tell about it in any other way but the link does work.
If you call and tell them to stop, they will only stop for 2 years then resume. Or resume when you take your vehicle to someplace that (re)sells your information to them.
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant (excepting Alice)
The USPS has an FAQ about mailing bricks, but it won't load for me. I do know they are allowed to throw away trash, and they could interpret a brick as trash.
If your reaction is wondering if this is legal then you should be interested in the passing of new laws that make it unequivocally legal. Society should be able to govern itself.
The societal ethics of Ozempic are an example of this. We've created policies and subsidies that flood the food market with unhealthy processed food to the point that the cheapest option is an unnatural amount of calories (compare US obesity rates to the rest of the world), so the solution is a pharma product that takes an additional cut of your wallet. It's an expensive solution to an expensive problem that shouldn't exist in the first place.
The software analogy is it's always easier to slap on one more piece of duct tape tech debt than to do the difficult thing and refactor the whole thing (acknowledging that part of the refactoring difficulty is you're not guaranteed to end up in a better state than you started from...)
Are you sure you need to hire an electrician in your jurisdiction?
I know, for example, the town of Cripple Creek, CO requires all their buildings to be made out of bricks. Pretty annoying. But it's because the entire town burned down twice in the 19th century.
So, maybe, someone in the past killed a bunch of people with bad electrical work.
Realized that it was an annual renewal of Prime. No email notification or anything. Dig around, there is an option to get a reminder email, but it defaults to off.
This is a growing trend too, reduced or no notification of renewal, even on annual subscriptions, so you get hit with a three digit charge out of nowhere (not that it's not our responsibility to track these things, but many of us do so less than we'd like).
I think we need a word for this work. Maybe disenshittification? :)
The solutions are not at all technically challenging, our political system just isn't effective anymore. That's why regulatory bodies do what they can to make rules while Congress and tech companies sit around counting their money.
Trump will do away with the FTC because it stands in the way of their goal of dismantling the executive administration. The only thing JD Vance supports about keeping Lina Khan is keeping her captured and institutionally bound so she cannot bring legislation forward against their agenda as a citizen.
Consumer protection
Which feels like it defeats the purpose of getting a new generated card.
The marginal cost to a gym/ISP of the remaining duration of your contract is basically zero, especially if you're not going to use it, and they can get a few more dollars by being a jackass about it. In aggregate the incentives dominate.
But getting a discount in exchange for a longer-term commitment is often a benefit to consumers.
I just paid Visible for a year of cellular service up front and it was far cheaper than paying monthly – truly a great deal. I was able to front that money now, but if I paid a slightly higher per-month price in exchange for a year contract, that would be the same but with less money required up front.
A problem with our contract law is that if you get anything out of a contract it becomes really hard to terminate if the terms don't allow for it (a peppercorn). With contracts now being written in dense legalese with multiple pages of terms and conditions, it's not really feasible to expect the common contractor to have a full understanding of exactly what they are signing up for.
This is already framing it in marketing terms. You're not getting a discount but being charged an artificial price premium for less/no commitment. This can get especially obscene in places where gyms are required by law to offer monthly membership options but they charge a significant markup if you go that route.
All of this has the effect of suppressing competition.
Jump to "Pre-payments in the Restaurant Industry"
Money now is more valuable than money later, and guaranteed future money is more valuable than no guaranteed future money.
Just make it so that you can remove the authorization of vendors to charge you. You see a vendor charging you for a service you no longer want - click a button and remove their authorization to charge you.
Years ago at Key Bank I even argued with a teller and manager about blocking a recalcitrant merchant from charging our account, "But you have ongoing charges with them and if we decline the transaction..."
Yeah, that's between me and them, you shouldn't be inserting into this to 'obligate' me to pay.
A company has a simple avenue to avoid inadvertent cancellation, they just ask the customer "did you mean to cancel, please contact us by $date to continue your subscription".
But that's preferring the citizen over business interests.
The thing is that sometimes you need to actually cancel the service, not just stop paying for it, to remove your financial obligations. Depending on the contract you signed.
Last year I had a company (DomainsPricedRight/OwnMyDomain aka GoDaddy) that I last did business (a one time purchase) with 18 years prior (2005), bill me under a new "subscription" with no input on my part.
PayPal sort of allows you to prevent that but it seems only with companies you have recently done business with.
PayPal did do a good job of email notification of the automatic payment and cancelling the "subscription" but there is no easy way to reverse the fraudulent payment, so in the end the consumer still gets burned for profit (it was only $1 but how many people had $1 stolen?)
As much as I'm not a big fan of PayPal¹ I use that rather than separate credit card payments/subs for online purchases including subs for things like hosting accounts. Stopping a payment from their web UI seems like it would be easier than arranging a chargeback or calling the CC company to put a block on future payments, and it reduces the number of companies that I hand my credit card details too. When I cancel a service I make sure that the sub is cancelled there as well. I always follow the cancellation procedure at the other end too, unless it is obnoxiously bothersome, as just cancelling the payment method feels like I'm being dickish².
----
[1] I'm not sure that I'd risk a business account with them, and I hardly ever keep a balance there, due to the many stories of accounts being frozen for long periods with litle reason and inadequate review.
[2] You might argue that often they'd be more than happy to be dickish, hence the cancellation procedures, but I prefer not to stoop to that level whether they would or not.
I contacted PayPal, who opened a case, according to their agreement with Steam (which I'm not party to). PayPal found Steam to be in breach of their agreement (PayPal & Steam's). I was refunded.
Then Steam enacted petty revenge against me, and continue to do so.
PayPal acted laudibly, imo, but there seems to be nothing one can then do about any revenge a company might take against a customer.
A hypothetical might be that you return damaged goods to Amazon, then they refuse to sell to you in the future because you demanded your legal rights.
A computer retailer appears to have done similar. I had to return goods to them that were broken on arrival; they refunded, but closed my account (I have assumed that this was because of the refund request). They do have a general right to drop a customer, or refuse service (outside of protected characteristics) but it seems wrong that "making a reasonable demand in view of legislation" (a device was broken when it arrived) is apparently an allowable reason for refusal of future service.
What you really want is a system where a customer who issues a chargeback that isn't disputed gets the money back, but the merchant also doesn't get a chargeback fee because there is no dispute. And then if there is a dispute (and the customer still wants to do the chargeback), the chargeback fee is loser pays. Then you have a reasonable way for customers to issue legitimate chargebacks that still discourages illegitimate ones.
What we have instead is that if you do a chargeback, the merchant gets whacked with a chargeback fee in the range of $20-$50. Obviously the banks love this; they get the money. But the merchants respond by banning customers who do this, because if you make a $5 purchase with a $1.50 margin and then issue a chargeback, the risk that you do it again before you make enough purchases to even recover the first one is too large.
But if you prohibited merchants from dropping customers over that then there would be no deterrent to fraudulent chargebacks (or to using the chargeback system with the eye-watering fees instead of the merchant's RMA process), so there would be more of them, and merchants would have to raise prices on everybody else even more to cover the bank's fees.
Whereas if you had a balanced system that minimized fraudulent chargebacks while still allowing (and eliminating fees for undisputed) legitimate ones, that would minimize chargeback fees, which is exactly what the banks don't want.
If I've had to do a chargeback, I'm highly unlikely to want to spend further money with that company in future, so they can "ban" me all they like.
My original post in this trail described how I minimise the risk that I have to faf around because of the status quo, which also reduces the potential for my direct payment data leaking due to security snafus, in the absence of the virtual card option in my locale. The one you replied to questioned one point in your description, which seemed to suggest that being banned by a bad trader was a problem.
Though I'll grant that being blocked could be an issue if that merchant was the only supplier for something that you particularly need.
Of course they don't care about that, it's the £10s across millions of customers that they possibly retain unlawfully that makes it worthwhile.
Afterwards, 1) if per month amount is greater than a regulated threshold, manual confirmation is needed. [ This is friction ] , 2) cancelling can be as simple as going to your bank's website and deleting the "mandate".
In all honesty, this is probably a really balanced approach, but the roll out was a real pain, with banks and merchants collaborating on who supports whom, etc. International payments got screwed completely - to this day, I can't subscribe to nytimes, after almost 2.5 years of this.
(A good summary - https://support.stripe.com/questions/rbi-e-mandate-regulatio... )
This hasn't been true for at minimum 10 years. Paying for extra leg room is not a "junk fee"
And we short but not to that far from the average height.
Heck, I would even take this a step further and say that taxes as well should always be fully included in the topline price. If a company wants to add a breakdown of how much went to taxes, I'm ok with that.
The sticker price should always be the full price.
one of the breweries i live by recently moved from non-tipped to tip, and it's generally a disliked change from what I hear because most of the time the brewery is open it's not busy enough to make up for the loss in wages, and then people fight over the really busy shifts.
I also think "plus Tax/Tax included" should be featured more prominently but I think that businesses would likely do that themselves given the conditions above so that, when comparing prices, you would very noticeably see that whether tax was included or not in your price. ie, Amazon would put in green letters near the price "Tax included" so when I compared their price to another place I would know why Amazon's price might be higher.
I definitely believe that you should be able to purchase something for the advertised price. Maybe that is "starting at" but you should be able to check out at that price.
I never said it was. In fact, I specifically said that there is work to do before making the rule about listing all prices inclusive of taxes.
Do the pre-work first, and then make a rule about displaying the final price.
Then the price may change at the checkout if you put in a different/unexpected delivery address.
It's a solved problem but we can't make it happen here. Why?
Now if you get any extra, sure. But that's a different problem from Airbnb hiding 100% of the cost in mandatory cleaning fees.
Carry-on luggage. Meal/snack and beverage service. A pillow and blanket. A seat that's not a middle seat. Even the ability to choose your seat at all.
Airlines that want to tighten the screws on their passengers can, in theory, start charging for all of those, and calling them "paid add-ons", even under a "no junk fees" law, if we don't clearly define what passengers should be able to expect to be included in their ticket.
There are usually ways to filter out by seat types, though, both on airlines websites and in places like Google flights. In my experience those are also pretty accurate.
If some even cheaper airline wants to sell tickets without carry on or whatever then they’ll have to list the higher price and offer a pleasant surprise of a lower-than-advertised price when the customer completed the booking.
If I need luggage, I can do my own legwork to make sure that I factor that in.
You think everyone should be expected to pay extra not to
- fly with nothing but the clothes on their back
- separated from their family
- with no food or drink, on a 5, 10, 15-hour flight
- with no leg or elbow room
- and no pillow or blanket to make it even vaguely possible to sleep?
> Guests in California will see a fee-inclusive total price—before taxes—on all listings.
https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/3610
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Now they just need to fix that part.
Case in point: cost breakdown from the invoice of an online order a few months ago (with the dollar amounts removed):
> Subtotal
> Shipping (Economy)
> Tax (Solano County Tax 0.25%)
> Tax (Vacaville City Tax 0.75%)
> Tax (Solano County District Tax Sp 0.125%)
> Tax (Solano Co Local Tax Sl 1.0%)
> Tax (California State Tax 6.0%)
Once your address is known taxes can be calculated. At what point is an after-tax final price to be shown? On an ad? On a targeted Ad? Once you reach the storefront based on unreliable geolocation? (which would be wrong for me, because geolocation bundles two cities here together as one) Once you create an account? At the checkout when you've specified the shipping address? As things tend to happen today, its usually only at the last step.
As much as I'd like to see it, I don't see much chance of improving the visibility of final prices without comprehensive systemic tax reform first.
The obvious quick solutions aren't exactly fair in the current US system. Imagine a "quick fix" of requiring the vendors to price in-a generic taxes for everyone. Just like with credit card system fees, "simple" fixes like that that benefit the residents of high-sales-tax states to the detriment of no-sales-tax state residents. While such a system would work for physical stores, they would get hammered if they had to prices on the shelves or signs that were higher than online prices.
As much as we all want a fair straight-forward system, I don't imagine it happening any time soon in the US. There are way too many unresolved zero-sum political fights and ideological differences standing in the way.
It certainly can be done (eg: Australia) but the circumstances there were very different.
My guess is the only solution (and it would suck and be met with much resistance) would be to make all the taxes based strictly on where the seller is, not where the buyer is. Then the buyer would have to be on hook for use tax instead of sales tax. States would not like this because most people skip paying use tax altogether.
Or just get rid of sales tax as a thing, and if you want localized taxes put them on property. That's what my state does (plus income tax).
I agree that we're unlikely to see any sane solution in the US in our lifetime.
Short of that, ban sales taxes levied by local governments; only allow states to levy them. It's easy enough to figure out which state someone is in.
https://www.allaboutadvertisinglaw.com/2024/06/minnesota-joi...
That's why you basically need a third party if you run an ecommerce website, unless you have a team to track down every time a county or city changes their taxes.
Every ecommerce site already has to calculate taxes on checkout, already has a third party for this information (usually the payment processor).
> FTC Proposes Rule to Ban Junk Fees: The proposed rule would ban businesses from running up the bills with hidden and bogus fees, ensure consumers know exactly how much they are paying and what they are getting, and help spur companies to compete on offering the lowest price. Businesses would have to include all mandatory fees when telling consumers a price
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/10/...
She may not be around for long (a travesty in my opinion if so). Neither presidential candidate is stumping for her kind of activism, even the Dem one. And the big money wants her gone.
Sure we can vote, but it seems big money has more influence regardless.
Harris hasn't outright said she would keep on Khan, but from a policy perspective I think they are very aligned, even to the point of Harris copying Khan's homework a bit (not in a bad way, just interesting). They have both explicitly called out grocery revenue growth exceeding total costs, both want to go after PBMs to lower drug prices, both want to go after junk fees, both have come out against algorithmic rent pricing, both have called out misclassification of workers.
If Harris does want to keep her on I still don't think it's in either of their interests for Harris to stake out a position. It opens the Harris campaign up to attacks on Khan's many court setbacks and erodes whatever bipartisan support Khan still has. Also, Harris doesn't have to do anything to keep her on, if she doesn't appoint anyone then by law Khan will remain acting commissioner indefinitely.
Obviously Khan is out if Trump is elected.
Booking with Alaska, I get a fare listed that is only the outbound leg, and then I have to discover the inbound leg price.
This often gives the impression that fares are or will be cheaper with Alaska, and then after a few clicks, you realize that they're (mostly) the "same".
Regulation like this, as necessary and obvious as this one is, should happen slowly. There are way too many short sighted, reactionary laws and regulations to begin with.
Edit: Instead of downvoting how about you point me to the Republican platform that endorses consumer protections ?
it doesn't help my skepticism that these sort of people/consumer first policies don't come out of these administrations until it is election time. They could have done this years ago but why if they couldn't benefit as well?
Tear like rip, torn, shredding, not like cry.
As a general rule, it is _way harder_ to make things worse than to make things better, politically, especially where it is clear to the average person that you are making things worse, and this is something that most normal people will regard as making things better.
Now, you could argue that net neutrality was also one of these, but net neutrality is, to the layperson, fairly obscure, and easy for a government who wants to get rid of it to lie about. This rule isn't at all obscure, most people have personal experience of the problem it solves, and it would be virtually impossible to spin revoking it as a good thing.
> it doesn't help my skepticism that these sort of people/consumer first policies don't come out of these administrations until it is election time.
This is, more or less, just a problem with the American system of government; so much of the civil service is appointees that every four to eight years there is a period where everyone at the top of the organisation changes, causing everything to grind to a halt for a while.
If they have this it's another reason to use them for automatic billing. I have tried to do this with a VISA card and they said they cannot do it; the only way to prevent future charges would be to close that account entirely and even then I might still get billed for some period of time.
But to add - I discourage you from using chargeback as a feature to stop future charges. Most banks will report it to your credit bureau - you won't see it in form of points being withheld BUT it might be adverse for you when you try to get a loan, etc. My mother disputed way too many things (memory troubles at her age) and they did not renew her CC after expiration date and MasterCard told her she is not eligible for card with her excessive CB ratio.
I never knew this! I have heard about companies banning you if you request a CB, which would be really bad for things like Google, Uber, etc.
I usually end up having to dispute a charge only once a year or so. It has surprised me over the past few years how lacking AMEX seems to be in its "investigation". It at least used to take a few days and they'd sometimes ask for documentation. The last one I did got turned around in maybe an hour.
Specifically, I'm using Qube, but at this point I'm looking to move away from them and do not at all recommend them.
I’m also using Qube and looking to get away but I really like having the sub-accounts. What have you found? Envelope seems to have really nice features but lacks the sub-accounts.
It happened to me once after I deleted a subscription for a server on my dashboard, yet was still being billed.
Of course I have to remember that they are blocked on that card, should I ever need an account again in the future.
Yes, but you have to call or chat them. It's quick, but I'd _much_ prefer a way in app / website to block a merchant.
a) be worth fighting for in court; and,
b) be of a nature the news won’t murder the company over the lawsuit.
Obviously, this would be much different putting a $1,000+ business SaaS subscription on a credit card vs. a $10/month consumer product.
Took a little bit of googling, but https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/24/2023-07...:
> Negative option offers come in a variety of forms, but all share a central feature: each contain a term or condition that allows a seller to interpret a customer's silence, or failure to take an affirmative action, as acceptance of an offer. Before describing the proposed amendments, it is helpful to review the various forms such an offer can take. Negative option marketing generally falls into four categories: prenotification plans, continuity plans, automatic renewals, and free trial (i.e., free-to-pay or nominal-fee-to-pay) conversion offers.
So the "negative option" seems to be referring either to silence-is-consent or an-explicit-no-option, and this rule is around how sellers present (or don't present) such ideas.
But I'm a bit fuzzy on this legaleese too.
I am very curious what exactly this means? Is it the number of pages or forms you had to fill out? People you had to talk too?
So if for my internet I had to have someone come out to install it before service would start could they argue that they require someone to physically come out to turn off service? Or a call since a call would be "easier" than someone coming out?
Could they make the signup and cancel process worse at the same time at certain times of the year if there is a certain time of the year where cancelations are high to justify a worse process? Or does this require knowing what the process was like when each customer signed up?
It feels like this could be fairly easily manipulated. Throw in an extra page during sign up just so they can add in an extra "please stay" page when you try to cancel.
> most notably dropping a requirement that sellers provide annual reminders to consumers of the negative option feature of their subscription.
I assume this means sending yearly reminders that a subscription is about to charge and how to cancel? This is fairly disappointing if so.
I really wish they just required what Apple requires on the App Store. It requires 2 clicks, clicking cancel and then confirm. No upselling since it all happens within Apple's Settings.
Then any yearly apps I always get an email about a week or so (not 100% sure of the timing) that it is going to renew soon with instructions on how to cancel.
Litigation could resolve malicious attempts to "complicate" signups for the purposes of complicating cancellation.
I am struggling a bit to understand how Comcast could not argue that it is required?
I don't fully remember but I don't think I started paying anything for my service until someone came out to install when self install wasn't an option. (I could possibly see them justifying removing self install in the name of retention later, since how many people really have a choice in their ISP and will just not deal with waiting for someone to come?).
If service was unable to start until someone came out, to me that could be argued as part of the sign up process.
I am not necessarily agreeing that it is part of the signup process. But we know that these companies love their shady practices and will have their lawyers finding any loophole they can find.
Is there a requirement that a signup flow is a single process that you do all at once?
What if they just moved the last contract you had to sign to something that you clicked on the technicians phone after they set everything up?
I get that it is part of the install process and we think of it as a different phase. But in reality how much of a diasctintion is that really?
I am trying to understand what is realistically stopping Comcast from saying that the signup process is not complete until service has been activated? Nothing I am seeing or what is being said here is telling me they could not argue this.
In theory, the economics of this don't work out (Comcast/ISPs might be an exception). It would raise their onboarding costs a lot and raise their offboarding costs too. But if they're a local monopoly the might get away with it.
That doesn't side step this - if you sign up in person they have to provide a telephone or online option to cancel that is just as easy as it was to sign up.
Now you'll need to return the hardware if you're using Comcast's hardware. Nothing changes there.
In the case of in-person consent the rule requires that they also offer an online or telephone cancellation option.
> Could they make the signup and cancel process worse at the same time [...]
"must be at least as easy to use as the mechanism the consumer used to consent to the Negative Option Feature.". I read that it must hold true for every specific consumer based on how hard it was for them to consent.
The rules also sets general restrictions to the online and phone options in addition to the "at least as easy" restriction. For Online the cancellation option must be "easy to find" and explicitly bars forced interaction with representatives or chatbots during cancellation unless they were part of the sign-up process. For Telephone the cancellation must be prompt, the number must be answered or accept voice messages, must be available during normal business hours, and must not be more costly than a call used to sign up.
It's complicated.
If all anti-piracy measures were enforced successfully, such as they are on Apple platforms; if there were insurmountable paywalls everywhere; but, subscriptions were cheaper, would you be better off? What about the average person? What is the right policy?
Like how multiple courts (up to the Louisiana Supreme Court) ruled that it was reasonable that when a suspect said "I want a lawyer, dawg." that police interpreted it as him asking for a canine who had been admitted to the bar, and since they couldn't find one, he had not made a valid request for counsel, and so they were free to continue to interrogate him without one, and not be in violation of his rights?
Or how about SCOTUS ruling that in order to invoke your right to remain silent, you actually have to state that you are doing so specifically, and that merely remaining silent doesn't mean you are ... remaining silent?
That kind of reasonableness?
We have an epidemic of overly-textualist, conservative courts living in an alternate reality.
Now only are these people unreasonable, they strive to be as unreasonable as possible, in order to project their political will of stopping progressivism, whatever that may mean to them.
Plenty of them are in the business of stopping regulation purely for the sport of stopping regulation, meaning regardless of what the regulation is.
> If people originally signed up for your program in person, you can offer them the opportunity to cancel in person if they want to, but you can’t require it. Instead, you need to offer a way for people to cancel online or on the phone.
Captcha games are going to become an olympic sport.
Which is the entire reason I am not a subscriber at my current address. It's too bad, I'd pay for it otherwise.
This is basically what I do with The Guardian where I donate after reading.
I often wonder how these companies predict the expected permanent loss of customers over time due to their tactics and factor that against the expected gain of wearing people down until they just keep paying.
The fact that even with the Black Card (any location) membership, you still have to be tied to one "home" location and can only manage your plan at that one location is also predatory. I've read stories of people calling into Planet Fitness corporate and eventually getting a customer service rep to cancel their plan (when the location refused to do so remotely), so it's not a limitation of their system and it's not a legal restriction, it's just another way they make it difficult to cancel.
I will mention, one loophole for at least getting around a bad Planet Fitness location (e.g. a manager pretending they're not receiving the cancellation form in the mail) is going to another location, having them transfer your membership there, and then cancelling with them. I've done the store-and-back thing for changing plans before, and the managers oftentimes don't care/are happy to help with it.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...
Even worse when their crappy VOIP software insta hangs up when you're up in the queue and you get kicked to the back to wait longer.
I hope this new law comes with domain cancellation and registration blocking penalties.
It's a shame credit cards don't offer the same thing (Chase is able to list them all but provides no contact information or ability to revoke authorization)
One of them can also create zero-cost virtual Visa Golds in a couple of minutes. If I need to use a really sketchy service, I simply create a throwaway card, put a bit of cash there, pay for what I need, and then delete the card.
One recent idea I've had is that many online subscription services should automatically pause if you stop using it. For example: if I go a full monthly billing cycle without watching Netflix then my subscription should automatically pause and allow me to resume it next time I log-in. There's a ton of money that gets siphoned off to parasitic companies just because people forget to cancel their subscriptions or because they're too busy dealing with life. It might not be viable for all companies, but there's definitely a lot of services where such a thing would be possible, given the huge number of customer analytics they collect. Maybe give people the option to disable such a pause feature if they're really determined to keep paying for a service. But a default where subscriptions automatically pause if you're not using them makes a lot of sense from a user perspective. Of course businesses would probably hate such a ruling because it means they can't scam as much easy money.
Cool idea, but probably tough to enforce what “using it” means. I could see companies start sending newsletters to customers and calling that engagement
I don't think it's the same situation. What Adobe was doing was offering a yearly subscription, charged monthly. If you tried to cancel, it would ask for payment to either cover the rest of the sub or to cover the "savings" that the user had obtained by selecting an annual sub rather than a true monthly (can't remember what exactly it tried to charge). It was deceptive as hell, but it's probably not covered by this rule.
But the "its yearly with a cancellation fee" was not qualified in the sales information on the sign-up page. Maybe it was in the fine print.
Given that customers are quite used to a monthly fee is a monthly subscription model, it was disingenuous at best. Putting significant terms in the fine print doesn't exactly engender trust.
There is no fine print. It is extremely clear and obvious. If you see a term called "Annual paid monthly", 33% less expensive than a monthly option right above, what possible other interpretation can someone have?
What the screenshot makes clear is that you'd have to be a single-celled organism to not understand what you're signing up for...
The screen is extremely clear, upfront and even the supposed "fine print" is in huge font with any easy link to learn more.
https://natlawreview.com/article/ftc-targets-adobe-hidden-fe...
But it is the way it is now for at least three+ years. People are still thinking they're beating the system.
Does it try to ensnare users trying to save some money now? Sure, it does. It offers some revenue planning for Adobe in return for a discount. The FTC is basically arguing that there shouldn't be such a discount.
My grounds for cancelling is that the software didn't work. And I don't mean in some qualitative sense. The software would just crash when opening files or creating new files.
Adobe never held up their end of the bargain - providing functioning software.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
It was such a wonderful feeling that clearly impacted me so much I remember it some 20 years later. I gained SO MUCH loyalty to Amazon after that, and sure enough, I restarted my prime subscription a bit later when I got a better job and started ordering more stuff. They made so much more money off me because they sacrificed those few dollars for one month of my subscription fee to show me they weren’t just trying to make me forget to cancel.
Amazon today would never do that, of course, but man I think more companies should if they want long term, loyal, customers.
Their return rate is still pretty terrible, IIRC. I bet they are trying to cut that down. I still see a lot (and I mean a LOT) of obvious Amazon returns in the line at the UPS store, and some of them are quite egregious (I stood behind a lady for 5 solid minutes a couple weeks ago and she was pulling return after return out of a big bag). Maybe Amazon will start firing those customers.
I think this is why I'm still such a loyal customer, and use Amazon for so many purchases. Intellectually I know that Amazon does super crappy things, both to their workers and around their website and sales. But I've been a Prime member since it was first offered, nearly 20 years now, and I still fondly remember when Amazon's customer service was pretty much better than anyone else's out there. It was actually delightful to interact with their customer service, which was (and is) so rare.
The service degradation is in terms of search no longer being useful, promoted/ad brands everywhere, popup 'businesses' with co-mingled inventory, fake reviews, just general lack of trust earning. Amazon used to be THE place to get the cheapest option too, but that is rarely the case these days.
Yup. This is the playbook of the Enshittification[1] process as coined by Cory Doctorow.
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
But does this actually hurt Amazon in any significant way, or do they simply externalize this cost by penalizing the original seller?
That allowed an amazing customer service experience, and immense trust: if there was an issue with your order that couldn’t be easily fixed, then we’re very sorry, and here’s your money back.
Both that program and the incentive for it are long gone.
Reddit is following the same pattern. Entice everyone over from digg, make users happy and grow base, appeal to businesses, then squeeze the business (API changes). Chrome used to be the faster, cleaner, more 'techie' option, and they too have departed from Day1 and moved into the squeeze.
Can confirm that was the strategy from day minus-three.
I had been considering learning Illustrator and to align myself, I decided to get a little skin the game. I signed up for the "monthly" subscription. I downloaded Illustrator, and this screenshot was my entire experience:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
Suffice it to say, this didn't meet my expectations. I thus decided to cancel and was presented with a $108 cancellation fee.
Boo.
I hit up customer service and explained my frustration. I was told that I was going to pay that $108 since I agreed to it. I countered that contracts required consideration and since Adobe had provided no consideration for my valuable cash, no contract had been perfected betwixt us. He was unwilling to see my point. I asked for his contact information for follow-up, which he provided. I then explained to him that after I hung up, I was not only NOT going to pay, but that within 60 days Adobe would cancel the subscription voluntarily on their side and not collect a single further dime from me.
His response basically amounted to "good luck with that."
So, I got a temporary prepaid credit card number with $5 on it and swapped out the CC on file with Adobe.
I then went over to Amazon and spent that $5. Who knows on what.
A month goes by, turns out $0 is insufficient for a monthly subscription payment. I get a notice that the balance isn't good. I get several more notices.
Then I get a notice that if I don't pay, I'll lose access. At about 60 days, they cancelled the subscription. I took a screen shot and emailed it to the CSR's contact with my "I told you so" scrawled on it.
I never heard back, but in my mind it was a great victory. Tickertape and swooning ladies.
I think you could also dispute the charges via your credit card company. The credit card company should reverse the charges.
- Some websites won't accept prepaid cards (largely because they can be used to get around things like this).
- Who knows if a platform's going to save your previous card info to use as a fallback?
- As another reply stated, the company can send you to collections if they think you owe them money. They can also do that if you do a chargeback, theoretically. However, with a chargeback, your card company did some basic checking of the situation and agreed with you that something was wrong about the payment, so assuming you win the chargeback, you've at least had a second pair of eyes on the case, and you have that tiny bit of metaphorical "precedent" to use if you take the collections order to court-- both of which also mean they're less likely to take you to collections. If you just swap out your card number for one that doesn't work, that shifts some of the shadiness to your end, and it legally appears less like you have any grounds to stand on.
My argument was that while I may have agreed to the cancellation fee in the fine print, they contract was not perfected because they never provided consideration.
The software would not work on my computer.
My grounds for cancelling the software wasn't that I wanted to cancel early, I was satisfied with a year-long subscription. My grounds for cancelling was that the software simply didn't work. It crashed when opening AI files are creating new files.
Maybe they closed that loophole, but it did used to work not that long ago.
That seems a bit fuzzy to implement, depending on what the service actually does. It's not always clear-cut, like watching a show on a streaming service; for example, what if the service does things in the background for the user too even if they're not actively 'using' it.
My compromise would be something like: if the user hasn't actively engaged with your service for X month(s), email/text them a reminder asking if they still want to be subscribed.
When you subscribe there are three prices given-
Monthly, Annual paid monthly, and Annual prepaid. The Annual paid monthly very clearly indicates that there is a fee if you cancel after 14 days. The annual paid monthly is some 33% less expensive than monthly, with the downside that you're committing for a year, or to pay a termination fee if you cancel early.
https://imgur.com/a/ldhiEtf
This has been extremely clear for years. Like you have to be blind to not see a "Monthly" that costs much more at the top, then one called "Annual billed monthly" and not have paused to do some diligence.
Adobe does a lot of shady stuff, but on this topic we seem to hear the most from careless, thoughtless, or selfish people who think they figured out how to game the system. Kind of like the "my laptop got stolen out of my car and it had the only copy of all of my important documents and the doctoral thesis I've been working on for seven years" stories, at some point we have to not be so naive with people's foolishness.
Neither the Devil nor Adobe need an advocate, but maybe you could help Adobe out with the Justice Department law suit around subscription dark patterns[1]? That signup page you took a screen shot of is the current version, older ones had more dark patterns and definitely were not as clear, hence the Justice Department law suit.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91142929/us-justice-department-s...
Civilization needs advocates against users being intentionally, misleadingly dense.
>That signup page you took a screen shot of is the current version
It is the version of the page that the FTC sued Adobe about. Adobe hasn't changed it.
Feel free to cite the complaint - https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/032-RedactedCom...
I'll help by posting a screenshot of the FTC's screenshot-
https://imgur.com/a/DQXYAN8
Page 8 from the complaint. Precisely the same disclaimers and selections.
Adobe has used this same format for three+ years. And no, the FTC filing a complaint -- responding to people doing the "woe am I...I am the victim for my carelessness" doesn't mean it has merit. Something got some congresspeople's to complaint to the FTC so they did something. And Adobe will probably just abolish discounting to make them go away.
> or need to pay more attention.
This is such a common and pointless argument. Here's the thing -- people don't pay attention to everything because who's got the energy for that. Companies know and capitalize.
Why don't you start by telling drivers and pedestrians to start paying attention when they drive on roads. When you've slashed car accident and casualty numbers in half, you can come back and tell us how asking people to pay more attention solves everything :)
Amazon got me on this multiple times for prime, now I always pay for delivery directly, because in the long run it's cheaper.
The most recent incarnation of their cancel subscription page had such intentionally shitty UX that I thought I had cancelled, but there were more pages to click through. So I ended up paying 2 months for zero usage. I'm fed up with the never ending changing landscape of tricks. Fuck subscriptions.
I'm currently in the process of de-Adboe'ing my life because of the subscription model.
It's not htat you get charged an exorbitant cancellation fee, per se. It's that, from Adobe's point of view, you entered into a year-long contract. And so if you want to cancel after 3 months, the only option they give you is to pay for the rest of the entire year upfront.
This has a lot of artists really pissed off and many are saying they're finally done with Adobe.
Fortunately, I think we're finally in an era where Adobe doesn't actually offer the best products anyway.
For Photoshop I'm playing with Affinity Photo. It has a six month free trial and after playing with it for a couple of months I think I'm going to pay for it when the trial is up. And it's a flat fee / perpetual license.
I've been playing around with Inkscape as a FOSS alternative to Illustrator and it's OK. I might give the Affinity Designer trial a go since I'm enjoying Affinity Photo.
For video editing Davinci Resolve is so far ahead of Premiere that it makes me wonder why Premiere is still used by anyone regardless of other considerations. What's bonkers is that BlackMagic gives the standard version of Resolve away for free... and I have yet to find myself needing features that are in the paid Studio version.
It has its own FX tool called Fusion built-in, so After Effects also gets replaced by Resolve.
I never used Adobe Animate but am starting to get into 2D animation and really like Moho Pro. It's not free but it has a perpetual license and apparently the first version of this software was created for BeOS 30 years ago, and then got ported to Windows and Mac as AnimeStudio... so it's been around forever, has a cool history and is starting to get used by a lot of pro studios since it gives you 3D style rigging for 2D / "cutout" animation which was its killer feature for me.
Anyway Adobe is one of the largest companies in the world but I suspect big changes are coming in a few years because I can't think of any reason to buy into Creative Cloud in current year ... like not a single reason. Maybe if you've got some PSD files laying around that can't be opened in alternatives like Affinity Photo because they take advantage of very specialized features or something then you might be screwed but I haven't ran into any issues opening my old PSD files in Affinity.
You make some good points but I'm not sure that this generalization really holds. It will depend on the terms of the license but I have heard of buying, selling & trading software licenses (at least on an individual basis, it might be harder for companies to do that).
Services I’m not sure even exist any longer. An AOL account!
They should clean up their act anyway. If other customers are like me I’ve been putting off joining for over a year because they’re so scammy and I don’t want to get locked in.
I even went to sign up and walked out because the price ended up being double what they advertised with weird fees and the base plan not being useable once they explain it.
I just had the pleasure of a one email cancellation with my gym after moving
When I lived in the UK and I wanted to cancel my gym, not only can you cancel the recurring payment thru your bank app, but the gym's website said that's how you should cancel.
LA Fitness wanted me to mail something to their headquarters, which was intentionally onerous. I filed a complaint with BBB and cc'd LA Fitness on them, and they ended up cancelling it for me.
Still, I did originally sign up for the gym in person, so I wonder if they'd be allowed to force the person to come back in person to cancel. This still seems like too much work, especially for when people move.
It is unfortunately more profitable for them in the end.
Which is precisely why we need these types of consumer protection laws.
After 16,000 public comments, and 70 consumer complaints per day on average, up from 42 per day in 2021, the idea is that FTC made the rule for an imaginary problem?
I went to the gym and well, it sucked. So then I want to cancel. Okay I go to the front desk. Can I cancel? No. They tell me to read the website. Okay I go to the website. It says "well... this varies gym to gym". Okay I call my gym "... yeah we can't cancel, you have to send a formal letter to HQ"
A letter? Really? As a matter of coincidence, my card gets lost, stolen, and used. So I cancel. Finally, I think, it's over.
No, I still get charges on my bank account from planet fitness. So I wrote a letter, mailed it, and then like 6 weeks later (so... another payment later) it's cancelled.
Keep in mind I signed up online, on my iPhone.
So instead of doing that all of that, I called my credit card company and asked them to block all future charges from the company. It worked like a charm.
It is up to the company to not pursue you for the money. Contractually, you probably still owe them the money, unless there is a clause in the contract that says that non-payment is a way to cancel the membership. They could legally pursue that, or sell it to someone else to pursue.
Not paying is not the same thing as not owing. Many companies will just let it drop. Some won't
Taken to absurdity they can't make you lick your elbow in order to cancel and making you jump through arbitrary hoops when an email to their support is perfectly sufficient probably falls on your side.
If one of the conditions is that you can't cancel without showing up in person or sending a notarized letter and giving 90 days notice, courts would find that enforceable if that's what you agreed to. Many online services will just allow you to cancel by stopping payment, many won't. That's why regulations like this are important, sleazy companies, like gyms and Adobe, are great at burying terms deep in their terms that are just on the right side of legally enforceable, but not reasonable to a normal person. The courts have to go with precedent and the law, even when it isn't 'common sense'.
If there isn't a prior contract or you never signed a terms and conditions, then sure, just stop payment, but almost any business is going to have a contract.
Ideally 'the market' would punish such companies but it seems to do the opposite in that once a dark pattern becomes mainstream, everyone quickly adopts it, and consumers don't really get any real choices.
When people buy an app on the app store they kind of expect it to work in perpetuity. This would be fine, but the environment changes and people still expect it to keep working. It is reasonable to expect an app I bought on my iPhone 4 using iOs 4 (or whatever it was) to work in perpetuity on that phone and that OS. It is less reasonable to expect it to run on my iPhone 16 on iOs 18, but that is what people expect.
The other thing that app stores did was dramatically lower the price point of software. In 2000, you could go to the store and expect to pay $50+ for an "app". Now, $9.99 is considered a higher price point, and we expect it to be maintained in perpetuity.
Given those constraints, a subscription model is actually pretty reasonable.
Add in that the investors in many companies are hyper focused on MRR, and subscriptions are the only viable way for a startup to work.
So I think you're right it's App Stores but for the reason that they force indefinite maintenance on developers.