There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one. Every time I click an “Unsubscribe” link in an email (it seems like they’re forced to say “Unsubscribe” and not use weasel words to hide the link) I’m either immediately unsubscribed from the person who sent me the email, or I’m taken to a page which seemingly MUST have a “remove me from all emails” option.
The level of compliance (and they can’t even do malicious compliance!) with this is absurd. If these new rules work anything like that, they’ll be awesome. Clearly regulating behavior like this is indeed possible.
The trouble is they're endlessly creative about the lists they put you on. I'd get one email from "Alumni Connections" and then another from "Faculty Spotlight" and then another from "Global Outreach" and then another from "Event Invitations, 2023 series". I'm making those names up because I forget exactly what they were called, but you get the idea. I hope this was in violation of the regulation: surely you can't invent a new mailing list that didn't used to exist, add me to it, and require me to unsubscribe from it individually.
They finally stopped after I sent them an angry email.
As usual, I know it's trendy to say on HN the EU is killing innovation with all the regulations, and there is truth to that, but there is also great customer protection, which seems constantly violated in the US.
So yes, in the US, companies can flourish, but it seems the consumers are second-class citizens compared to companies.
That's why it's nice to have both: eventually, EU regulations leak out to the rest of the world, and the US innovations reach us.
We pay the price by having a weaker economy, they pay the price by having less dignity in their life, but there is eventually balance.
Sometimes an innovation needs critical mass to work - social networks for example. LinkedIn famously got big by being extremely aggressive on how they mined your contacts. You'd get sued to the moon and back in the EU for this behaviour.
LinkedIn is big now, it has established itself and no longer needs to be that aggressive. Any European player that tried to enter the market with a less aggressive stance had no chance - they never reached that critical mass.
And to be clear, when I say suboptimal results I mean misery and death in large quantities.
Regulation are a necessary balance, otherwise the innovators become so powerful they eventually concentrate all the power and privilege and make weaker people pay for it.
Chlorofluorocarbons were an innovation for some times, then we needed regulation to save our ozone layer. Industrial wouldn't have stopped using it.
It's a fine line, constantly moving, an nobody will never be perfectly happy about it.
It doesn't need to be black or white.
A country can have decent consumer protections without e.g. a tax policy that is hostile to startups. But many EU countries are seemingly uninterested in the latter — presumably because there are no votes in it.
I would imagine the potential legal risk for some orgs would be enough to make them comply, especially those with a European presence (and surely a university like Brown must have both at least one legal entity and enough alumni in the EU for them to count). The worst they could do is say no.
it technically applies to anyone resident in the EEA and UK, as well as citizens of the EEA and the UK abroad
If I catch any of these email lists not respecting my unsubscribing, I immediately mark them as "spam".
Gmail then doesn't send them to my inbox anymore. I don't think just one person marking them as spam hurts them, but at least I feel gratified and my ego is satisfied.
Since it’s usually opaque how “mark as spam” and “block” actually works, and since the origin of the mailing lists can be reconfigured any time.. I still feel like I’m endlessly spammed by all the assholes I have to do business with, or else I’m going to miss a bill or a flight.
Yes it's very stupid.
My telco does as well, and I got a free Nintendo Switch from them for just having fiber internet that I would need anyway (the telco just owns the fiber, the ISP then goes over that open fiber, so I pay two different companies, it's the former that has the point program despite being the definition of a dumb pipe)
Some site I haven't used in 5 years reminding me to login and check out their deals? Sounds like a phishing trap to me.
Throw something in the cart at a random website? Now you're on their mailing list and get reminders to finish checking out. Doesn't matter that you never consented. I don't know how this isn't a violate of the CAN-SPAM act
What happens- at scale and I have to believe deliberately- is the “checkout created” event with that flag set to true is considered as “opted-in” by the marketing automation platforms everyone uses, like Klayvio.
Even if you immediately un-check it, un-checking doesn’t trigger an unsubscribe event, since you never submitted the form in the first place.
And because your Shopify session is now shared across stores, your email address gets opted-into marketing just visiting a checkout page.
And of course, follow-up mails for abandoned carts are an optional setting too.
My theory is it started by accident- if you get a notification that says, “this checkout, this email, agrees to marketing: true”, it sure reads like an opt-in, and it used to be reliable. But it’s not anymore, because your email is already attached to the checkout when its created.
“Agrees to Marketing” pre-dates the global Shop session by years, it’s plausibly an ecosystem bug; one with no real motivation to solve until customers start talking (more)
Ahh yes, the feel-good response that Google gives you without doing anything substantial to prevent spam from reaching you in the future.
What is your experience?
it's not me, it's you. Screw you if you send me mail I don't want!
Reporting spam does not block the email from being received by my client -- it only blocks the mail from being seen in the inbox, but it still shows up in the spam box.
I don't send mail that gets reported as spam in the first place. Or, if it does, then I haven't been meaningfully affected because I can still send and receive the email I want to.
> I don't send mail that gets reported as spam in the first place.
I ran a newsletter where people had to opt in to receiving it. It was announce news for a video game. You only ended up on this list if you entered your email, clicked join list, and then clicked the link in the email we sent to you to confirm subscription. We had a big unsubscribe button at the very top of the email. We still regularly got people who hit report spam on us, presumably as a way of saying g they didn’t want the email anymore.
They're probably expecting their email provider to take that info and use it somewhere upstream of their own individual account. Which, as you've pointed out, does happen.
Maybe they don't believe that it happens often enough or something, but the thresholds do need to be reasonably high since, as you pointed out, some people hit the button whether it's justified or not. If the threshold for email provider action was too low, you'd end up not being able to send to anyone with Gmail because one guy forgot he signed up to a list (or signed up and immediately reported it as spam to spite the sender).
The person you replied to also sounds like they may be using an offline or third-party email client, though. There's a difference between a "Report Spam" button somewhere your email provider controls, and a "Mark as Spam" button in your third-party email client. I'd assume there's some kind of protocol that could potentially allow third-party clients to report it back to the email provider, but would also assume it may not be as reliable as first-party interfaces.
Report spam, as a generic feature? It's an okay starting point "as-is" but useless for preventing malicious use and it hasn't meaningfully improved since launch.
Specifically for google: allow users to block whole domains; I can already do that on my own mailserver, why can't I do that on Google's? Then, block mail from foreign countries -- or at least countries that I don't care about; I can block whole ASNs on my mailserver, why can't I on Google's? That then leaves only mail that I can bring legal action to.
Another iteration: when you "unsubscribe", then keep a record of it, and also show the history of emails that you've received from them on a confirmation dialog. Show me anything interesting like purchases, warranties, appointments, etc. When confirmed, keep a record of it. Show me a list of _all_ of the things I've unsubscribed from. If email is still received, automatic report spam and block the domain. Oh, that means that mailing lists must come from the same domain that sales are made on.
Another iteration: a subscription should require a confirmation. Let the email server recognize the confirmation, and block emails whose unsubscribe links aren't in the list of confirmations. That means an unsubscription link should go to the same domain that a subscription was confirmed on.
That's just a few spitballed ideas. Spam reporting functionality is clearly iterable, but it hasn't meaningfully changed for decades. It's still primarily done through opaque "reputation" scores and little else.
I don't want "report spam" which doesn't give me feedback and continues to let spam onto the wire to my client, and isn't powerful enough to use to block bad actors from trivially getting to my inbox. I don't want to be expected to (and trained to) click on unverified links which take me to somewhere I don't recognize, and could take me somewhere malicious. I expect more from the largest email provider(s) in the world.
It’s usually not newsletters for me, but small niche companies who sell very specific things and feel a weird urge to have a weekly newsletter. It’s like all they sell is 2 models of guitar capo, but they still feel the need to send me weekly updates on I don’t even know what.
The kind of things where I not only don’t want the emails, but I want to register that I feel I was misled when I signed up.
Most, if not all, political junk email also ends up in my spam folder after judicious use of the spam button a few years ago.
I've had numerous "businesses" that I've reported spam end up back in my gmail inbox after years.
I've stopped using gmail because of it not iterating on spam blocking capabilities.
I've seen how the campaigns pass around email addresses without consent. (Mostly from ActBlue) So I'm concerned about validating an email address via unsubscribe.
I've reported this to abuse at sendgrid, and now sparkpostmail. They're shopping for email services.
Proof of org spamming:
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; dkim=pass header.i=@e.kamalaharris.com header.s=ak01 header.b=kJamWIyP; spf=pass (google.com: domain of bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com designates 168.203.32.245 as permitted sender) smtp.mailfrom=bounces@bounces.e.kamalaharris.com; dmarc=pass (p=REJECT sp=REJECT dis=NONE) header.from=e.kamalaharris.com
Also, as a general rule politicians will carve themselves an exemption to any rules they put on everyone else. For example, CAN SPAM applies to commercial email.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/nyregion/redistricting-ma...
https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-california-gerryman...
There is three times as much outside money going to the Democratic candidate for the Presidency as the Republican one:
For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore.
Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.
California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population.
> overrepresention of Republicans
That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs.
And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote.
> this is from Citizens United
That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.
Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media.
Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.
Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people would disagree with as "pretty clearly correct" and stating an alternative as if it is the only alternative, that is not what many people think the alternative would be, is only going to raise hackles. It's not going to spur any new thought or interesting dicussion.
Which it is, but as the GP described, it's about a lot more than that.
I happen to think it was incorrectly decided - SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending. It would have left the door open to not-for-profit corporations still being free to spend money on e.g. publishing a book about a candidate within some date of an election, which is precisely what we want not-for-profit civic organizations (which are, you may recall, also corporations).
However, it really is "pretty clearly correct" that had SCOTUS simply ruled that "no corporation can <X>" (for various values of X), we would be an extremely different and probably much worse situation than we were before CU. Whether it would be worse than the one we're in post-CU is hard to say.
It's not obvious how that would have made any difference when a for-profit corporation could just give the money it wants to spend to an aligned non-profit to spend it in the same way. Unless you mean to prevent them from donating money to the non-profit, but then where is a non-profit supposed to derive funding? "All political speech can be funded only by government grants" has a pretty clear conflict of interest, and you would then somehow have to deal with for-profit entities that inherently engage in political speech like newspapers and cable news networks. Why should Comcast/MSNBC or Fox be able to dedicate unlimited airtime to political advocacy but not Intel or Ford?
I'll ponder them carefully, and may respond in a day or so.
"Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania alone — the three states with the worst gerrymanders in the last redistricting cycle — accounted for 7 to 10 extra Republican seats in the House."
Re: Citizens... I don't even know where to start. Read about the McCain-Feingold Act. It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).
Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad - in fact, they have to offer them a slightly _below commercial market rate_! Weirdly, though, they are responsible for the _factual content_ of any ad they run. Election law is really interesting.
The Brennan Center is a left-wing think tank. They're basically describing the thing I already mentioned in partisan terms:
> "Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party."
> "Because of residential segregation, it is much easier for map drawers to pack or crack communities of color to achieve maximum political advantage."
In other words, if the geography is such that there are areas where one party is highly dominant (i.e. urban areas) and other areas where the other party is slightly dominant (suburbs) then if you draw districts in a natural way the second party gets proportionally more seats because they win a larger number of districts by a smaller margin. They're essentially complaining that those states didn't gerrymander the districts to favor the Democrats to offset the natural advantage of Republicans in the existing geographic population distribution.
But Congress isn't intended to use proportional representation and gerrymandering to force the number of party seats to match the popular vote is just disenfranchising people in a different way by ignoring the effect that has on the behavior of individual representatives. For example, what they're proposing would be a de facto ban on majority-black districts because one district which is 60% black and votes 65% for Democrats and another that votes 55% for Republicans would result in fewer seats for Democrats than two districts that are 30% black and both vote 55% for Democrats. And both of the Democrats in the latter districts would have to move to the right because they'd otherwise both be at risk of a Republican picking off enough moderates to flip the district.
> It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering.
It required them to spend the money in different ways, which mostly lock out smaller companies, meanwhile conglomerates buying news networks has been a thing the whole time.
> (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).
Political ads are ~1% of all ad spending and much of even that money goes to the likes of Google and Facebook. Meanwhile it means non-media companies that want to air a political message can do it directly instead of having to do so indirectly by allocating more of the other 99% of ad spending to traditional media companies to curry favor and provide leverage to get favorable coverage.
It also dilutes the power of media companies, because the media company is not going to air coverage contrary to their own political interests no matter how much you run non-political ads with them, whereas someone who has a contrary interest can now run ads on social media.
> Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad
But it prohibited most entities that wanted to run those ads from doing it.
Suppose Comcast and AT&T don't like network neutrality and Amazon does. So Comcast buys MSNBC and AT&T buys CNN, gears them even more to viewers in the party that had been advocating it, but suppresses advocacy of the issue they're on the other side of to shut off support. Should Amazon now buy their own network? Is that better than letting them run Facebook ads? What if the EFF or some non-teracorp like Digital Ocean support network neutrality, but can't afford to buy a major network?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/us/politics/recurring-don...
Trump and Biden both spammed my physical mailbox with the usual slick mailers, though the Biden campaign had an interesting twist in that I kept getting what appeared to be hand written postcards from people in metro Atlanta where I lived but every single one of those post cards was postmarked San Francisco. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and think maybe the postcards were written in bulk by the actual people in the Atlanta area and then sent to some Biden associated organization in SF, who then paid the postage for all the individual postcards to go out.
My friend group has mostly moved to texting or other messaging apps. Email is kind of like letters in the 90's..
I would get two or three emails a month from them, and I would click unsubscribe every time. The emails would continue. Finally, in 2018, I got the "We're sorry to see you go" unsubscribe confirmation email.
Then about three months ago, I started getting emails from the Rensselaer Office of Annual Giving. But this time it was to my work email, not my personal email. How would they get my work email address?
I have no idea how this happened, but I suspect universities play fast and loose with their mailing lists for exactly the reason you said. It's obnoxious.
An elegant weapon of a more civilized age (the early internet): if they're pushy in requiring one -- just lie.
Meanwhile he gets a text asking for a blood donation more or less every week.
And I have to disagree with the OP, though, because the only people who obey CAN-SPAM are the people who are generally not actually real spammers.
CAN-SPAM really only helps you get unsubscribed from marketing emails, not actually spam at all. As with all laws, outlaws will ignore them while law-abiding citizens get caught by them. Real spammers don't care and casually flout laws until, finally, they get caught by technological means.
As usual, the regulations are too little, too late, and apply to a completely different group of people than is even named in the title.
Some of us consider ALL marketing emails to be "spam", with the sole carve out being if the user consciously and actively opted in.
I have no problem with marketing newsletters existing if people enjoy receiving and reading them. But if you email me without my active solicitation then it's no different than a door to door salesman physically knocking on your door when you don't expect it and don't welcome the interruption.
I will happily concede that legal definitions may differ from my own. But on a personal level, I apply the "Hollywood principle": "Don't call me, I'll call you." If you call me (or email, or knock on my door, or mail me a physical snail-mail letter) and I'm not expecting it, and it is of a commercial nature, it's my definition of spam.
Anyway, email delivery is regulated by Microsoft and Google.
I’ve unsubscribed from at least 3-4 different types of emails from them already.
I had to call them (!) since they didn’t even include an unsubscribe option as I was a customer (!!) and have the CSR delete my email address from their records — because apparently this happens routinely.
Companies routinely break the law in small ways at scale — and they should get the RICO hammer dropped on them for doing so.
Later they create another list and you end up subscribed to just that new one, even though the unsubscribe from all option is still selected.
Edit: Another pet peeve is when you click the link to unsubscribe, and they want you to enter your email address. Bonus points are awarded when your email is in the querystring, but they fail to populate it.
This would pair nicely with a progressive fine structure based on the income/assets of the offender that grows exponentially after every offense.
Exactly, this is the core of the problem. Thought I am grateful for the "unsubscribe" option... I am putridly disgusted by the humiliation of unsubscribing to something I never subscribed to in the first place. It's just awkward and sleazy all around. Put simply : if a name is to be added to such a list, it shall require the consent of said person a priori, a new consent must be made per each list, with blanket future consent strictly banned, and secondly mass solicitations for consent also banned.
To those of you who live in California, I expect many, I would advise in these cases to invoke the CCPA act i.e. (a) "give me all the data you have on me" (b) "delete all the data you have on me". You need to ask (a) first, then given that, then ask (b). If you imply you want the data deleted, they will just delete it and say "oopsie we can't provide you the data", so it's important to perform this sequential order. If Californians did this at mass scale I would imagine there would be a lot of positive bleedover to other states in limiting this behavior.
CAN-SPAM specifies that the link must be clearly marked and suggests using CSS to do so, but the link is still always going to be at the bottom of the email in the smallest font used. It only matters for those of us who know to look for it; many people just have to live with the spam because they don't know it's easy to unsubscribe.
Sometimes it's not even going to be underlined or distinguished at all (that may be a violation actually but I'm not going to take them to court over it).
There's other dark patterns too, like certain unsubscribe pages requiring you to type/paste your email in to actually complete the process. That is 100% intentional friction, like github making you type the name of a repo into the deletion form. It should also be illegal for unsubscribing.
Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway. Companies generally know people aren't going to read more than maybe a sentence in a given email. I can get to most unsubscribe buttons without even scrolling. If I do scroll, it's like 3 scroll wheel notches.
Yes, because after a century of public relations and marketing you expect fine print to be in these locations because you have been marketed to from infancy, which has made you apparently, forget that today's dark pattern creators stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before them, and the fact that you expect that stuff to be there is because your worldview has been successfully engineered. Important links under the fold, aka the first page are there to be overlooked. What they want from YOU is top of the page.
>Most emails I get aren't long enough to scroll anyway.
Careful with that kind of thinking, marketing works on everybody. A seed is planted, by appealing to emotional arguments. If it takes root, then your worldview starts to change, via rationalization. The smarter you are, the better and more subtle your rationalizations and better it works.
This project of social engineering was given to a guy named Edwin Bernays, who wrote several very plain and easy to read books on how he was going to do this project. First one was "The Engineering of Consent."
I've noticed that many email providers (e.g. GMail, Apple Mail) will actually show an "Unsubscribe" button for some emails, but not all. I wonder if it just heuristics, or there's actually some existing mechanism that is used to communicate it.
The one great thing about email is that your email provider isn't paid for delivering spam to your inbox unlike the USPS. There's zero incentive for Gmail to deliver anything but legitimate emails from responsible senders whereas the USPS will gladly deliver presorted mail because they've been paid to do so. I kind of wish I could pay USPS to not deliver junk mail.
Also most clients provide an unsubscribe button at the top too.
This about auto renewal not contracts.
Even now the CAN-SPAM act feels outdated -- I do like the unsubscribe button, but I would like to see email verification made explicitly required. That in order to start emailing you, you need to send an initial engagement email saying that the organization wants to start emailing you, and requiring you to actively opt-in to emails rather than just start sending them.
This would both cut down on marketing spam as well as mistaken email addresses. Most reputable websites do email verification where you have to enter a code or click on a link, but I have a surprising number of emails that get sent to me even though I am not the person the emails were aimed at.
The FTC's establishing laws make "unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce" unlawful and give them power to regulate that. It doesn't seem to be straining at the limits of remit to rule that making it hard for people to end a subscription is unfair/deceptive.
What is the specific nature of the "deception" -- what claim was made, and how is it not being honored?
Don't get me wrong -- I've been bit by this and I hate it and I think Lina Khan has done wonders for antitrust enforcement and I wish that she would take it even further, but the proper body to address this is Congress, through legislation rather than regulation.
E.g. $0.001 per email, paid to the recipient
Insignificant at personal scale, but a deterrent to sending low-value emails at mass scale, and double-painful when an unbalanced flow (i.e. a spammer who receives no organic email coming in)
An accountant would just look at that, figure out the click-through rate and plug it in to weigh it up against the CPM/CTR of equivalent advertising.
And you'd lose any "ethical" arguments against spam. You'd unlock a tidal wave of companies who would now feel justified in spamming because they're paying to do so.
Just as companies don't feel ashamed to bleed adverts into every other waking space.
The key insight here was making it expensive for spammers, but cheap for everyone else.
Consequently, where X < Y.
The loophole is that companies now claim that the email is 'service' related as part of your 'account relationship' so you cannot unsubscribe at all, even though it clearly is for marketing and promotion.
Equifax abuses this to the extreme, with every single change to your credit usage triggering an “account related” alert. But you still need to allow them for that one time they actually send a useful alert.
Despite the requirement for a link in the email, of course they're going to put it at the bottom, using a smaller font, often with a font color that's closer to the background color. This is garbage. Instead we should have a standard for an email header that specifies how to unsubscribe, so that email clients can present their own unsubscribe button in a conspicuous place, and then unsubscribe the recipient without any extra interaction required. And if these links fail to work too many times, the email provider can use this as a signal to stop accepting mail from that sender entirely. (And we do have this standard header! It's called List-Unsubscribe-Post.)
But this still doesn't really go far enough. I want a full ban on sending me unsolicited marketing emails. Signing up for an account somewhere should not mean they're allowed to send me marketing emails, and any checkboxes authorizing that along the way should be initially unchecked. And they shouldn't be able to dark-pattern me into checking them by making it look like a required consent type checkbox.
Absent that, any entity that wants to market to me should have to send me an initial email confirming that I indeed want to receive their marketing emails. If I do not reply, that's considered lack of consent, and then they should not be able to try again, at all, forever.
A major reason for the mass adoption is that most companies use email services because running your own marketing email servers are extremely difficult. And those companies don't allow you to send emails without one to protect their own email servers in addition to following the various laws in different countries. It's easier to get compliance via these larger companies, particularly when it naturally aligns with market incentives.
Regulating a million niche SaaS sites each with an individual custom payments page may be quite a bit harder. But maybe stuff like Stripe will make it easier as a proxy for this regulation.
The sheer number of comments that think the state of "unsubscribe" is good is... saddening. I should not have to click a link to "unsubscribe" from something that I did not subscribe to. There's no recourse for me against these thieves.
That other problems also exist doesn't mean this solution for this thing isn't good.
The state of Unsubscribe is better than what it was before the laws around it went into effect, but it doesn't go far enough.
There's technical workarounds, too. Like unique emails for each and every service.
I instead used GDPR to request a removal of all my data. That worked.
Exactly! Total scumbags. The way I would frame the feeling for people who don't get it - Imagine coming home from a walk. Your car is gone. Someone left a note on your front door. "Hi, thanks so much for letting me borrow your car! Call me at this number when you want it back!". The manipulative car thief in this example would deny stealing - pointing out they would return the car whenever asked. So you call them and ask for it back, but a bit of your soul dies - to ask for it back is to play along with the ruse that this is what you consented to in the first place. Or at least "would definitely have consented to if available which you weren't". And the loss of control over consent leaves a persistent sense of violation, after all, someone just stole from you and then has the gall to pretend you consented, to your face (or front door).
Perhaps the car borrower-without-permission should have owed up to being a car thief. Perhaps the subscribe-without-permission thieves should own up to being just spammers. The insult of it all is not so much from the random spam, but this manipulative pretend game where we have some spam shitelist LARPing as a reputed newsletter of great public interest - the gall of the spammer to make-believe that you subscribed.
It would all be easily solved if there were civil penalties for it. I'd gladly go after anyone and everyone who pulled this shit as a public service.
If someone, say, signs up for an account on your website and opts-in to marketing emails, then sure, you can send them marketing emails.
If you have no relationship with someone, or they haven't opted in, no, you should never send them even a single marketing email.
Now, actually important emails about my order or account, those I have no problem with.
No, people should be able to email me as they would normally.
I should be able to block senders, or entire domains. To use a direct example: if I decide that substack is shit because they subscribe people without consent (which is exactly true), then I should be able to block all things from substack and not just a single email address from the domain.
If the spammer is operating within the continental US (or any other country with a reasonable court system), then the spammer should be legally and monetarily liable for the time and money wasted. Everything from the second it takes my server to receive the message, to the second it takes to transmit to my email client, to the multiple seconds it takes me to read the headline and/or body, and the time it takes to press the block button -- the energy costs, the hardware cost, the bandwidth cost, my own time's cost, and the cost of lost confidence in the safety of the internet (just as a thief in your home makes you lose confidence in the safety of your neighborhood) -- all of it should be legally and monetarily liable.
So when that shit substack email puts on a SendGrid or Mailchimp facade, or goes through some Cloudflare or CloudFront or whatever CDN, those "businesses" also get blocked and sued into oblivion because fuck any "business" that doesn't want to own the relationship with their customer, and fuck any "business" whose customer is not the person they're emailing.
So... you want to send me an email? Cool! I hope you will agree that it's legitimate *and wanted*. Because if it's not then I should be able to take you, or your business, to court for wasting my time (and time is money) -- and win on that ground alone.
tl;dr:
Why do I have such a stark view on this, many might ask?
Well let me put it simply: "legitimate" spam is indistinguishable from targeted phishing. So that "unsubscribe" link that people so proudly claim is a great solution? Clicking it does not improve the spam situation and does increase vulnerability to malicious actors. I'm not going to click on that because it doesn't go anywhere that I recognize and can verify. That "unsubscribe" link is worse than a real solution because it's only theatre.
You might want to start by addressing physical mail, or advertising billboards, if you want to radically overhaul some of the fundamentals of society.
It's on my todo list. The amount of incessant spam, that's legally protected by the USPS, is astonishing.
Can you walk me through the steps? Gmail doesn't let you create a filter which sends to the spam box. There used to be, but it was taken away. I know because I used it a lot.
Even if the feature was still there, it was still received instead of rejected, and it only moves the offending mail to the spam box instead of deleting it.
``` var threads = GmailApp.search("[your search criteria] -is:spam"); for (var iThread = 0; iThread < threads.length; iThread++) { GmailApp.moveThreadToSpam(threads[iThread]); } ```
Quickly going through their own documentation I found out that this is not true: Substack allows you to import CSV subscriber lists without the consent of each subscriber, ostensibly to allow painless migration of old mailing lists. That feature is of course abused, and they did nothing when I reported the abuse, presumably because spammers represent a large part of their business.
What a piece of shit company.
Then you hovering over topics you might be interested before unsubscribng gives away preferences.
I look at that email once a week for the false positives. Huge QoL increase.
> Because you're a valued Vanguard client, we thought you'd be interested in this information. If you prefer not to receive emails of this type, simply email us. Please do not reply to this message to opt out.
> The material in this message is promotional in nature.
No unsubscribe link.
> There really seems to be no loophole or workaround despite there being huge incentive for there to be one.
My spam folder constantly receiving new messages from political campaigns under new lists and org names begs to disagree. One donation in 2008 and I'm simply trapped in the system with no recourse.
Seems like the rules selectively don't apply to certain classes.
I suspect that people who say this have no experience of European-like systems which work on the basis of regulating things to prevent them from becoming an issue.
A huge part of this is to make sure the regulators have clear guidance and the teeth to enforce regulation. Take, for example, the UK's Health and Hygiene regulator. They have the power to inspect premises and processes and force proprietors to make their ratings visible. In extreme cases, they can shut down an establishment for non-compliance.
Is it 100% perfect? Obviously not, people still get food poisoning or swallow glass in their food. That said, it's not common, and you can easily avoid 1* establishments. If someone isn't displaying their star rating, it's obvious why and you can easily avoid them, too.
Ultimately every regulation needs an uncaptured civil service regulator who can take offense at somebody trying to perform cheeky workarounds and impose disproportionate punitive measures & regulatory adjustments when the spirit of the law is violated. If you don't have that (and we don't, in many areas), then you don't have effective government.
This is why the Federalist Society going after Chevron deference is part of an attempt to overthrow the government; If the iterative regulatory loop demands a full appellate process followed by getting half the votes in the House, 60+ votes in the Senate, and one vote in the White House, then no regulation will be performed in practice. Virtually everything the FTC does is now subject to Federalist Society veto given sufficient time for the lawsuits to be filed & processed.
Now if we could only have the same level of control over the junk mail in our physical mail boxes.
To the extent that I see anything other than spam email it’s just because of spam filters not anything regulatory. If you don’t believe me just run an email server with no spam filter.
This regulation might actually be better though because it applies to only services users have given a credit card to. Those services are thus 100% dependent on access to the federal banking system, which can easily be revoked.
During the ~20 years that my predecessor in my current job worked in it, it gradually evolved from being primarily a hardware position with a little software development to primarily a software position with a little hardware building. My moderate expertise with electronic hardware helped get me the job, but then I basically never had to use it in the ~15 years I've been here.
I still get multiple emails from Electronic Design daily. No amount of attempting to unsubscribe stops them. I've blocked multiple sending email addresses; they rotate them fairly frequently.
It's possible I could report them for this (I haven't researched it), but since I think my spam filter has missed maybe 1-2 emails in all that time, it tends not to be worth it.
The FAQ confirms this is the correct place to report email spam https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/faq
Imo it should be a single header that points to a url that accepts a post payload. Email clients could then surface the link
If there is no regulation, the government is at fault
If regulation doesn’t work, government is at fault
And if it works, they still don’t get the credit
I've started blocking all of them and sending straight to spam.
Can spam provides for up to $50k PER EMAIL in civil penalties.
If you make 1 cent or $10 per email, doesn’t matter. It’s no where close to that level of penalty. So you make damn sure you don’t ruin yourself.
Now we just need that kind on text messaging - it’s a Wild West these days
I'm working with a state lawmaker in my state to try to get a law to this effect passed, but I'm asking him to write into the law an individual cause of action. In other words, I don't want people to have to wait for the state attorney general to take notice and decide to act (or the FTC in the case of this article). I want the affected user to be able to go to small claims court and sue for $500 or $1000 or whatever. I believe this will be much more effective as it forces the abuser to have to defend themself in court all over the place (at significant cost) or lose all over the place (at significant cost) or stop abusing.
There are now email unsubscribe services, but they don't really work either: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-email-unsubs...
It's the knowledge that users will mark your messages as junk if there's no easy unsubscribe button.
With the re-centralization of email, reputation score in Outlook/Gmail is critical.
Same with Resend. Start at home before blaming others or screaming at the sky.
The general problem is that the government is miserable at drafting things. Even take the regulation you like:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...
> "Your message must include your valid physical postal address."
WTF? They can't just pass a simple rule that says you need a working unsubscribe link, they have to include some arduous nonsense that requires small businesses to pay for a PO box so they don't have to publish their home address in every email.
Nobody wants to unsubscribe by postal mail. But decades later the requirement is still there. So then businesses oppose every new rule because the government can't refrain from making them pointlessly onerous.
While I generally agree with your opinion, the case is that bad actors are using the unsubscribe link to identify real email addresses. The vast majority of people do not match what I imagine might be the average HN tech-savvy audience.
They get an email they don't want and click on "Unsubscribe" to get rid of it. What they don't know is that they have been added to a database of "live" emails to be sold and reused for all sorts of purposes from that point forward.
In other words, as is the case for many laws, they keep honest people honest. You do not control criminals with laws until the result of the law is that they end-up in prison (or whatever the appropriate punishment might be).
I ran an experiment during the last presidential election (US). I used two separate throw-away emails to subscribe to updates from both the Republican and Democratic parties. I used these emails directly on the main organization pages. I also setup filters to sort all incoming emails into two separate folders.
A year later I deleted both email accounts and the tens of thousands of messages on both folders. It was an interesting game of whack-a-mole. Clicking on "unsubscribe" had no real effect. Both parties passed this email to, it seemed, everyone except for the local school janitor. It was nothing less than insane. There was no effective way to make it stop. I unsubscribed from both main organizations. That did nothing at all.
My conclusion was that, while "Unsubscribe" sounds good and looks useful, it only works with non-criminal organizations (sorry, I consider political parties to be at the threshold of being criminal organizations). It's like a lock on a door, or, to use a more provocative example, a gun. The laws surrounding these things only get respect from honest law-abiding people. A criminal will gladly take a crowbar to your door-lock and break into your home, or use a gun to do the same or worse.
Going back to unsolicited emails (and by extension SMS), not sure how we fix this in real terms. It's a really difficult problem.
Further, often I get the "okay, we'll remove you within 30 days" bs
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.
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.
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.
But does this actually hurt Amazon in any significant way, or do they simply externalize this cost by penalizing the original seller?
Can confirm that was the strategy from day minus-three.
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.
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.
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-
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 :)
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...
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).
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.
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.
Maybe they closed that loophole, but it did used to work not that long ago.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/...
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.
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.
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.
California'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...
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.
Obviously, this would be much different putting a $1,000+ business SaaS subscription on a credit card vs. a $10/month consumer product.
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.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/holyoak-dissent...
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.
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...
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Instead, I should be able to seamlessly create new credentials per vendor with expiration and limits. I should also be able to stop payment at any time.
And if I do, I just call the number on the back of the card and they give the money back to me.
The system works 99% of the time, for billions and billions of transactions. Which is why it has stayed.
Edit: obviously, ideally, there would be a federal government constitutionally protected electronic payment system where people can push payments to one another.
How carefully do you check? I check my statements line by line, and have found fraudulent charges twice in the past 30 or so years.
People should be in control of their own money. The current system categorically absurd.
It seems like a decent solution that emerged without a federal government solution (could be better, but things progress incrementally).
What is absurd is the lack of action on part of the federal government (which eventually filters down to voters) on developing electronic payments as resilient infrastructure, in conjunction with digital identity verification.
For example, USPS could provide a constitutionally protected, inalienable right (not even if you go to prison) to an electronic money account, and you can send and receive via an email address or phone number. USPS because there are already physical USPS offices all over the country.
No need for government to lend people money via credit card equivalents. Just obviate checking accounts at banks. Banks don’t have a purpose when money is just entries in a database anyway.
Keeping money “safe” is no longer a physical thing to do. If a lender wants incentivize people to deposit money with them, then they have to compete by offering attractive interest rates. But then it will come with the risk of the lender losing your money, like any other investment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Captcha games are going to become an olympic sport.
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?
I sometimes subscribe to these organizations for a few months, then cancel to try something new, come back for a bit etc.
But NYT has forever lost me with their cancellation nightmare.
In fact, I suspect most people have far more sophisticated relationships with digital companies these days than ever before. Grievances like cancellation pain are an oversight of antiquated businesses that don't realize it, imo
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.
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.
I just had the pleasure of a one email cancellation with my gym after moving
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...)
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Then the price may change at the checkout if you put in a different/unexpected delivery address.
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.
It's a solved problem but we can't make it happen here. Why?
> 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).
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".
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.
If I need luggage, I can do my own legwork to make sure that I factor that in.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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... )
Which feels like it defeats the purpose of getting a new generated card.
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 ?
I think we need a word for this work. Maybe disenshittification? :)
Consumer protection
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.
It is unfortunately more profitable for them in the end.
Which is precisely why we need these types of consumer protection laws.
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.
After the announcement, did they also show the middle finger to “Adobe”?
Adobe brought ruins onto themselves ( over confidence) by thinking that customers will agree to whatever they did.FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707558 - June 2024 (847 comments)
US sues Adobe for 'deceiving' subscriptions that are too hard to cancel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707037 - June 2024 (4 comments)
Cable firms to FTC: We shouldn't have to let users cancel service with a click - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39038645 - Jan 2024 (24 comments)
FTC investigating Adobe over making it too hard to cancel subscriptions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646666 - Dec 2023 (33 comments)
Disney, Netflix, and more are fighting FTC's 'click to cancel' proposal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36706138 - July 2023 (324 comments)
Some companies think customers will accidentally cancel if it's too easy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36665814 - July 2023 (163 comments)
FTC sues Amazon over ‘deceptive’ Prime sign-up and cancellation process - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36418713 - June 2023 (262 comments)
The FTC wants to ban tough-to-cancel subscriptions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35274519 - March 2023 (382 comments)
FTC Proposes Rule Provision Making It Easier for Consumers to “Click to Cancel” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35272777 - March 2023 (8 comments)
“Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250063 - Nov 2021 (861 comments)
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.
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.
Why isn't there something like a "Proof of human" protocol where when you sign up you verify yourself with government ID (same as you do for banks) and then from this you can produce infinite unique ids for authentication to websites instead of emails. Your identity is unknown where you sign up, but wherever your ID is used it is known that it is a human being.
>80% of all emails are used for nowadays seems to just be to have a unique ID in a database for a user that can also be used to contact said user. You could have some protocol where the unique ID can be used to initiate a chat with someone, but they won't receive it unless they opt-in.
The incentives for ad companies would even align with this since what company doesn't want exclusively "proven human" users they try to send ads to.
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.
Click to Cancel: The FTC’s amended Negative Option Rule and what it means for your business
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/10/click-can...
I consider that direct wire fraud. I didn't want Discord having that information and yet someone gave it to them.
And Discord should get charges for receiving stolen funds via wire - I think that does fall under wire fraud as well.
So I called my credit card company and put a block on any charges from Disney.
[1] https://www.tomsguide.com/how-to/how-to-cancel-disney-plus
No, I never found it.
But I do thank you for the tip! But I cancelled Disney for a reason - their shows were unappealing to me.
I'm about to cancel Apple TV too. Every time I see a show on it I'm interested in, it costs another $3.99.
Also, your subscription there cannot be cancelled from the mobile website nor from the TV.
Virtual numbers protect against people stealing your number. They don't really do much against subscriptions.
If you sign up for a service and stop paying, it gets sent to collections, and then impacts your credit score because of unpaid debt. Whether you used a virtual number or not is irrelevant.
So it's not "insane" not to use virtual credit card numbers. To the contrary, it's just not usually worth the hassle. The few times my number got stolen and fraudulently used over the past two decades, I called and the transactions got reversed immediately. And those all happened after I used my card physically anyways, not online, so virtual numbers wouldn't have helped anyways.
I'm very excited about the new click-to-cancel rule for this reason — hopefully doing the "right" thing will be really easy and actually work.
This is not true. They cant override a limit or bill a vCC that you disabled.
And in the ones that don't, banks still get information about your late payments and unpaid debts; they just make the same determinations privately. The only difference is that it's less transparent to you, so you can't even check whether their information is accurate.
There's nothing "Orwellian" about it. There's nothing totalitarian about checking whether somebody pays their bills or not before you decide to lend them money.
All these companies operate, if not rouge, at least gray and would never bother reporting it to a credit agency. By the way, credit agencies: Many scammers make a living out of advertising apartment that do not exit. They try to make you sign up for an affiliate, subscription based, "credit check".
Plus if you have recurring subscriptions then you can change the terms of service that nobody reads whenever you want.
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.
While the FTC's intention to protect consumers is commendable, this new "click-to-cancel" rule may have unintended consequences that could harm both businesses and consumers. Here are some key points of dissent:
1. *Overreach of Regulatory Authority*: The FTC's broad application of this rule to "almost all negative option programs in any media" may exceed its statutory authority. This sweeping approach could face legal challenges.
2. *Increased Costs for Businesses*: Implementing new cancellation systems and processes could be costly, especially for small businesses. These costs may ultimately be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.
3. *Potential for Increased Fraud*: Making cancellation too easy might inadvertently increase the risk of unauthorized cancellations by bad actors, leading to service disruptions for legitimate subscribers.
4. *Loss of Customer Retention Opportunities*: By prohibiting businesses from discussing plan modifications or reasons to keep existing agreements during cancellation, the rule may deprive consumers of potentially beneficial alternatives or information.
5. *Inconsistency with Other Industries*: The rule may create an uneven playing field, as some industries (like telecommunications or utilities) often have different cancellation processes due to the nature of their services.
6. *Consumer Responsibility*: The rule may unfairly shift the burden of subscription management entirely onto businesses, potentially reducing consumer responsibility and awareness.
7. *Innovation Stifling*: Strict regulations on subscription models could discourage innovation in service offerings and pricing structures that might benefit consumers.
8. *Compliance Challenges*: The 180-day implementation period may not be sufficient for all businesses to comply, especially given the broad scope of the rule.
While consumer protection is crucial, a more balanced approach that considers the needs of both consumers and businesses might be more effective. The FTC should consider a more nuanced rule that addresses specific abusive practices rather than imposing broad restrictions on all negative option programs.
I disagree. Fuck subscriptions, they’re predatory.
I also think they're mentally aligned with the idea of having to go through 20 forms to achieve something, as that's their daily job.
I can't think of any worse way to get me to immediately not vote for you than by sending an unwanted and unreimbursed SMS message.
A half dozen attempts and no one knows how to find it. Of course it finds my bank account just fine somehow.
I doubt this will stay or it will be enforceable without the actual law.
But maybe this a way how certain companies what to drag this down…
It should have been possible to cancel right from your bank statement.
You can also just pay as you go, i.e. per visit but that ends up being a lot more expensive.
Cannot you just go to random gym, pay for enterance and do ya thing without signing stuff?
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.
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.
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.
In eastern eu I just enter the gym and purchase daily or monthly ticket
Just like train ticket
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.
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.
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.
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.
12x monthly individual subscriptions
1x annual $0 subscription on the anniversary date that renews the 12 monthly subscriptions again
Or if the company can stomach the card fees, make it weekly...
Hope the next dark pattern to be banned: buttons on a website should have consistent design!
So tired of having the opt-out (inconvenient to provider) buttons disguised as text.
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/holyoak-dissent...
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".
It's a dark-pattern underhanded dirty trick when you don't.
As coldpie said:
> Remember this when you're going to vote. Elections matter.
(high empathy justice sensitive human)
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.
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.
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.
Mindsets like this are actually why democracies fail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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 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.
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.