The consumer protection laws are so bad the other side of Atlantic.
Most European countries, have their own version of consumer protection agencies, usually any kind of complaint gets sorted out, even if takes a couple months.
If they fail for whatever reason, there is still the top European one.
Most of the time I read about FTC, it appears to side with the wrong guys.
Absolutely. I don't know if it's the FTC or FCC, but the moment I swap back to my American SIM card on trips to the US, I start getting spam texts that I cannot get rid of. Meanwhile I get absolutely zero of these with my European number.
The problem is US congress has not functioned for 2 decades. They no longer pass actual laws. This means the FTC is stuck reinterpreting their existing powers to try and squeeze out regulation that they can but that's it.
If the FTC can’t do what the FTC is supposed to do, then that is the FTC’s fault for continuing to exist. It’s unfit for purpose and should be shut down.
The ftc isn’t supposed to create laws though. I tend to overshoot on the consumer’s side, but the ftc is overstepping with actions like this. There should be a law passed on this point and then ftc can enforce. Or ftc can sue based on existing law and let courts buy their interpretation.
True but generally speaking American companies usually have much better customer service and better refund policies than European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners the market or has no viable alternatives.
So maybe the American way of doing things can also work if a healthy competitive environment is preserved.
The problem lately is that American companies have become monopolies and the formula firms extracting profits or stock hikes for the shareholders dictate that they screw the user up until barely legal territory.
So maybe America can roll without consumer protection laws and agencies if they can fix the business environment.
They just need to find a way out of enshittification, a process US companies perfected.
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.
The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.
It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
> It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite.
Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.
I've used a learning platform called Brilliant in the past. The cancellation process was so convoluted that it was impossible to cancel the account. Dark patterns and confusing language.
They refused to refund me and after I thought I'd cancelled and I had to run a charge back from my bank.
This is nefarious behaviour on their part and consumers need to be protected from it.
In contrast in EU, I sent an email to my service to cancel and they forgot to cancel. I just sent them another email with proof of email and they realised they missed the old one and canceled retroactively and refunded money to my account.
One consequence here that people need to think about is that ALL subscription services should be viewed with suspicion. Once you sign up how much of your life will be deranged simply by trying to cancel the service. It's a hidden cost which shouldn't be forgotten.
So there's a business argument for this regulation. If the consumers feel unsafe giving their credit cards to most companies, they'll spend less on subscription services in total, harming the industry more than they gain from milking zombie customers.
The FTC was warned at the time that they were flouting required procedures and that their rule would therefore not survive legal scrutiny. Lo and behold it did not.
> The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a $100 million effect.
> But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said. Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule," the judges' panel said.
You must not work on these sorts of systems. It can easily take more than 24 hours. In case you’re genuinely interested in learning more, here’s how it works.
There are good reasons for it working this way, BTW. The needs of a company with hundreds or thousands of people are different than the needs of hobbyists and early-stage startups.
1. A user experience designer analyzes the user flow and decides where to put the cancellation button. They make decision about style, layout, and wording. This isn’t a ton of work, but something so critical to the company’s business and retention numbers will probably involve a lot of review, discussion, and bike shedding. This could easily take 24 people-hours of work on its own.
2. Somebody programs the front-end change. They probably have to put it behind a feature flag so it’s not visible until the back end is ready.
3. Somebody programs the back-end. They think about security, authentication, authorization, CSRF. That’s probably handled, but again, this is a critical feature and deserves extra care.
4. Somebody programs the interface to the company’s internal systems. They’re usually kind of a pain to work with. Billing, marketing, support, customer success. Something probably sends an email to the user. Maybe there’s a follow up flow to try to get them back with a special offer a month later. Etc.
5. The change is tested. Preferably with automated tests, but a feature like this has tendrils into systems throughout the company, and a lot of moving parts, so manual testing is also important. If it goes wrong, it’s a big deal, involving the potential for chargebacks and lawsuits, both of which are expensive at scale.
Throughout all this, you’re dealing with legacy code, because billing is one of the oldest systems the company has, and the one with the most risk of change, so the code is nasty and doesn’t follow current conventions. Every change is painful and tedious.
It’s alien to you that this could take more than 24 hours? At any company of size, I have trouble imagining it taking less.
Well, after you factor in some of these companies are probably large corps with layers of middle management. It will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
1. Not pegged at inflation, so the threshold is continually moving downward.
2. All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies to blow out the threshold. If you take the companies at their word, then you will never get under this threshold. Why trust them?
But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do given that now it won't be done.
Right, if they were screwing over customers, we’d call it disruption and give them a medal, if not $1 billion dollars. Since they’re trying to help people, we wag our fingers at them.
Whistleblowers are almost always revealing information that they are legally prevented from revealing, otherwise you wouldn’t need a whistleblower. A simple FOIA request would suffice.
That’s obviously no justification, all corruption is in someone’s favour. Society functions by rules. Break those founding principles and you break everything.
I always felt like those click to unsubscribe links were nothing more than a "please prove to us with certainty that this is an actively used account so we can set a sticky bit on it and sell that info for $$$"
That’s a commonly held idea for spam emails. This is about services you’ve signed up and pay for on a recurring basis, and was targeted at companies who make it very easy to open an account, but then require byzantine methods to cancel.
> So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will automatically decline.
I learned this the hard way with the New York Times doing this, but merchants can “force settle” a transaction if they want and it’ll override the decline they get. This is a violation of the merchant agreement but companies do it anyway (like NYT did to me). Privacy isn’t as bullet-proof as you would think.
Yes, Capital One offers a similar virtual card service and when I read into the fine details it wasn't as useful as a thought. There were seemingly exceptions that could override spending limits for subscriptions and the control was mostly an illusion.
Privacy.com is a fintech platform offering virtual debit cards to secure online transactions. Based in Iceland and partnered with FDIC-insured banks, the service allows users to control card usage through pausing, unpausing, or closing. Privacy.com prioritizes security through firewalls, encryption, and PCI DSS compliance.
Revolut along with quite a few other modern EU banks let you manage recurring billing directly - in Revolut I can pick any transaction in the app, click "Block future payments" and that vendor won't be able to bill my card again until I unblock them. That's separate from virtual/disposable cards - you can use your normal card and still block individual vendors.
Honestly this seems like a pretty obvious core banking feature nowadays, I'm surprised it's not more widespread (even in the US - reliable cancellation features across all recurring card payments would surely make people more comfortable with subscriptions). Under the hood all banks (AFAIK) are handle recurring payments by issuing an authorization token at first purchase, and validating it on later transactions. Allowing customers to see the list of active tokens that were recently used and then revoke them explicitly seems like a no brainer.
Revolut has a disposable card feature. I'm sure there's some regular old school banks that have this as well, ING in the Netherlands does as far as I remember.
revolut and others still try to charge you, even if you cancel the VIRTUAL card. when you ask them, why and how they you do that, they say you have some sort of agreement for the subs. service and you need to end it on your own via them. Bank can't do that?? they said something like that to me. So they literally support the dark pattent side, not on your side obv.
Your bank might offer this already, just to check in case you haven't already. I think all banks I've had in Spain and Sweden has offered this feature within their web portal.
> But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed $100 million.
> The FTC had argued that it was not required to prepare the preliminary analysis because its initial estimate of the rule’s impact on the national economy was under the $100 million threshold — even though ultimately the presiding officer determined the impact exceeded the threshold.
This is a case where congress really did pass a concrete law, and the court is requiring the FTC to follow it. Sucks that a reasonable rule is getting voided for the sloppiness but I really don't think the courts are indefensibly out of line.
It's interesting that businesses can build an obviously toxic subscription model that robs consumers of both money and time, but when asked to change it now we have to consider their costs.
I understand the idea behind the threshold for changing rules but this still feels very broken. There is a constant struggle of having to do everything perfectly to make any positive progress, but bad actors can operate however they like with seemingly little repercussions.
The bar should be where changes happen to move in the correct direction easily, while moving in the incorrect direction harder. If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens, because the "potential gains" of doing so would be enormous.
When bad actors have a low bar but good actors have a high bar, the country is bound to collapse. Look at how many rules the current regime is flouting. But the other side has to dot every i for some reason.
Are we still talking about click-to-cancel here? There aren't 'other sides' in any meaningful sense on this sort of administrative decision. There is a solid consensus that people shouldn't have to pay for subscriptions they don't want and a couple of broadly inconsequential points to debate on how to implement it.
This is exactly the sort of situation where just following all the rules and procedures is fine and it doesn't, within a pretty broad range of outcomes, who gets final say.
I am not getting it. The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster. And thus improve economic situation, not only in markets affected by rule, but also on all other markets, in case customer wants to take his money elsewhere.
And on international scale, because more competitive companies presumably out-compete foreign competitors.
So, FTC needs some permission and review to make national economy money?
The FTC was not given unlimited rule-making power by Congress, and has to live within the power granted to them.
Issuing an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) and conducting a regulatory analysis for certain rules are examples of such limits. The FTC did not follow the second (as was required) in this case.
Whether I happen to agree with the change they enacted (I do) doesn’t change the fact that I want my government agencies to follow the rules laid out for them. Because as surely as the sun rises in the east, sooner or later they’ll propose a rule I don’t agree with and I want there to be a lawful process and framework in place then, and therefore also now.
Devil is in the details, they said each company would have to pay for less than 23 hrs to a low level engineer to avoid the $100 mil impact.
How much time do you think an intern would need to render a button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already implemented function in the code base. Especially with trillions poured into the AI?
This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of idiots know it
There’s a non trivial chance this interacts with credit card processing. There is also app the legal liability of you tell someone meet are cancelled and continue charging them. So probably so not something you trust an intern to do.
This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.
The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.
These “bench full of idiots” are not blind to the fact that there are deceptive practices regarding subscriptions. FTC didn’t do their job right unfortunately and here we are. Now, new administration and it’s doubtful this will get picked up again barring any law passed by Congress.
It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.
Normally I'm aligned but this is sort of a NEPA rule making sticking a monkeywrench in the gears creating new regulations, so I'm not totally opposed to the principle, as irritating as it is here.
Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.
Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.
You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.
Not gonna lie, I actually have canceled many service because of this single reason. If I get the feeling they want to hide these options specifically to keep me in a subscription, I immediately feel the urge to cancel even more, and also it gives me the feeling that the service itself is obviously, objectively, not good enough that they can just be honest and offer a easy cancel option - because they fear that too many people would.
You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial but sorry to tell you that "most" people is "forgot" they sign up something and not open it in years
> You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial
Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.
I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.
Legally, this isn't sufficient. Your subscription contract is independent of your payment method. If you don't pay, that doesn't necessarily mean that your subscription is cancelled, and you could end up in court and lose.
What is necessary is regulatory (or statutory) enforcement of easy, online notice of cancellation, without a company able to frustrate you giving them (and them recording and acknowledging) that notice.
You can use privacy.com as another commenter has written. But one catch is I believe you can be on the hook for subscriptions where your card no longer works but you haven't cancelled your subscription. So they can send you invoices and even send it to collections. Although I strongly feel that at least for transactions of a sufficiently small size (normal retail subscriptions) cancelling your card should be legally considered sufficient enough for voiding your future subscription. I'm open to hearing counter arguments but I think the consumer shouldn't have to jump through even the smallest of hoops setup by vendors in order to indicate that they are no longer interested in future transactions.
I always try via official means, but, failing that, I just cancel the (virtual) card. I have been threatened a lot that if I do that, my first born will be punished etc but of course nothing ever happens. I don't live in the US though.
This type of activity is happening with Amazon Netflix and other medias also with various E-Commerce sites Apple particularly is asking for all particulars train to debit after the expiry of the period but is not allowing cancellation properly as the bandwth work remains down in many many areas sporadically we are not able to cancel at will.This is a user unfriendly activity which is monopolistic or coercive.People will lose faith in digitization slowly
I had a recurring charge on my Capital One credit card and canceled it from my Capital One app. The next month, the charge went through again and they proactively gave me an account credit equal to the charged amount, with an emailed apology. I'm not sure why they couldn't cancel it, or if it will go through again this month, but it surprised me!
I had a subscription with an account that I couldn’t access anymore, and there wasn’t any other way to cancel
So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund me, but then the company would charge me again for the subscription
This went on for several months. At some point the card expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription to my new card, even though I couldn’t even access my account
It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember how I finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see the charges “jump” through different cards. Especially given that usually any service that I don’t want cancelled, gets immediately cancelled if my card on file expires
Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.
The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.
When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.
Thats how it works in India: all your "repeating" charge authorizations show up on a portal maintained by the issuing bank. All services that charge via these authorizations send an SMS alert before they debit the next charge. At any time, you can go into the portal and cancel any of these authorizations. No need to talk to the charging co at all, though still, best to first cancel from them. Jus that they know its trivial for the user to go and cancel the auth, so no one makes it difficult to cancel.
Here in the Netherlands, via my bank I can list all of my pre-approved transfers and block them. I'm pretty sure every bank here is required to support this. PayPal also has this feature.
I recently had to cut down on expenses starting with extraneous subscriptions and charitable donations, of which I had dozens. Many ad a click-to-cancel or at least fill-out-a-form-to-cancel process, but some of them said 'call us'. Then I discovered that I could cut them all off from my side!
I got a few 'hey your donation stopped' messages, and answered the first ones, but they all eventually went away.
I work for a company called Subaio that does exactly that, but it only works because EU (and some other countries) consumer protection laws requires that companies have to let us cancel subscriptions. So we're mostly working with european banks for now.
The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.
Could you point me to some European banks that integrate your product?
My current bank doesn't have something similar, and I would like to have an option to view all my subscriptions at a glance
In theory I can do this with standing orders / direct debit in the UK and there are some subscriptions where "cancelling the direct debit" is the official way to cancel. There should be no need for firms to reinvent recurring payments and store card details for their own ad hoc system. I don't know if it might disadvantage some people not familiar with managing direct debits though.
However, many years ago, after an hour on hold failing to cancel Virgin ADSL I just cancelled the direct debit instead. They put a debt recovery firm on me! The direct debit was charged at the start of each billing period so it wasn't a non payment thing. I recall there used to be more indefensible "notice periods" for cancellation which were just pure scummy ways to force feed unwanted services but I don't think this had one.
I wasn't able to jump through their hoops to sign up. They wanted my bank login, which I will absolutely not give to anyone. I tried a debit card but that also failed.
Nowadays a problem is the subscriptions are all multiplexed through apple, google, and amazon.
I used to religiously use things like ynab, but now I need to find ways to export my amazon transactions, google play, etc. It's nearly impossible, and it makes me feel completely out of control.
I'd have different wallets for everything if everything took Bitcoin. I guess I could do that with generated credit card numbers but haven't bothered with it.
Ask my girlfriend about my phone call with Time Warner (pre Spectrum) where I said the words "I want to cancel cable TV but keep internet" about two dozen times to 3 different people.
My favorite underappreciated aspect of the iOS app store is its absolutely friction-free cancellation.
It makes me much more willing to trial a subscription service because I know I won't have to spend an hour of my life on the phone with a lovely Filipino man to stop that service.
It is one reason that with this switch allowing apps to send me outside of Apple's Ecosystem to subscribe, I hope that developers realize that if they make this the only option there are likely many people like myself that just won't subscribe to your app. I am far more likely to try a subscription that costs a couple dollars a month if it is through the app store instead of through some random website.
Google Play also has that if you subscribe through there (which might be more expensive because of the fee Google takes), plus an easier refund system if you subscribe to something and decide it's not worth paying it
The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1), which states that the agency “shall issue a preliminary regulatory analysis” whenever it proposes a rule expected to have a significant economic impact.
After its own ALJ found the rule’s effect would exceed $100 million annually, the FTC was obligated to publish an analysis of the “projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other effects” and the effectiveness of alternatives, as required by § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
It's not hard to implement, in the sense of "hard to implement software feature".
It's hard because businesses don't want cancellation to be easy, as they lose money. A lot of people forget to cancel or just can't be bothered for a long time, especially if cancellation is hard.
And yes, it's as predatory as it sounds.
It's basically the financialization of business, as some point one of the few ways towards "growth" is nickel-and-diming everyone you can.
Here is an idea, make your service value for money and people will not want to cancel.
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel then your product needs to be improved.
Man what the fuck is it with gyms? I'm not even in the US, but even in the Netherlands where these kind of things are generally super simple and hassle-free (by law) I've had some nightmarish, headache inducing situations with gyms. I've literally never encountered anything else, ever, nearly as bad as dealing with gyms and their contracts in my entire life. It was a million times easier closing brokerage accounts with decent chunks of money in them than it was to cancel a gym membership I once had.
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel, then your business model should be illegal.
Of course it's going to cost more than $100 million if they have stop stealing from us.
Corporate Republicans hate red tape and regulation for business but love it for starngling government and the poor (they just added huge onoreous red tape to medicaid and food stamp recipients because they absolutely hate their fellow americans).
What about the earlier administrative judge who warned FTC they were ignoring established rules when it was reviewed the first time, then FTC proceeded to ignore that judge and passed it anyway, which resulted it in being in front of this appeals court?
This was pretty well established by the constitution, only you left out white male from your rich and powerful. It took amendments to get past white and male.
I hope the FTC tries to re-submit the rule while following procedure - click-to-cancel is really good for consumers... but not enough to justify trying to break laws to pass it.
This is the definition of an ad hominem attack. If you want to prove the judges are partisan, talk about the flaws in the ruling, not who appointed them.
That's the problem that automatically arises when the justice system is made out of political appointments instead of career tracks.
There will always be the suspicion of political bias, and the haphazard way the administrations ever since Obama went in how nominations were done adds more fuel to the fire.
Yeah not a great article. "failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process" but no real details on what the procedures require that the commission did not do.
…the Commission failed to follow procedural requirements under § 22 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”), 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1)
A more detailed explanation:
The Commission’s formal rulemaking authority is found in § 18 of the FTC
Act. Section 18 authorizes the Commission to adopt “rules which define with
specificity acts or practices which are unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or
affecting commerce” within the meaning of § 5, as well as “requirements prescribed
for the purpose of preventing such acts or practices.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(a)(1)(B)
(emphasis added).
…
Besides the specificity and prevalence requirements, § 18 requires a number
of procedural steps, some of which go beyond those required for APA notice-and-
comment rulemaking. The FTC must first publish an “advance notice of proposed
rulemaking” containing “a brief description of the area of inquiry under
consideration, the objectives which the Commission seeks to achieve, and possible
regulatory alternatives under consideration.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(b)(2)(A). Also
required is a notice of proposed rulemaking “stating with particularity the text of the
rule, including any alternatives, which the Commission proposes to promulgate, and
the reason for the proposed rule.” Id. § 57a(b)(1)(A). Interested parties must be
afforded the opportunity for “an informal hearing” and to “to submit written data,
views, and arguments” on the proposed rule. Id. § 57a(b)(1)(B)-(C), (c).
Congress further required the Commission to conduct regulatory analyses of
proposed and final rules, or amendments to rules, at two stages of the rulemaking
process. First, when the Commission publishes a notice of proposed rulemaking, it
also must issue a “preliminary regulatory analysis” containing “a description of any
reasonable alternatives to the proposed rule which may accomplish the stated
objective of the rule” and for the proposed rule and each alternative, “a preliminary
analysis of the projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other
effects, and of the effectiveness of the proposed rule and each alternative in meeting
the stated objectives of the proposed rule.” 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1)(B)-(C).
Second, the Commission must issue a “final regulatory analysis” when it
promulgates a final rule. 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(2). Similar to the preliminary
regulatory analysis, the final regulatory analysis must include a description of
alternatives considered by the Commission and an analysis of projected benefits and
adverse economic and other effects. The Commission must also provide “an
explanation of the reasons for the determination of the Commission that the final rule
will attain its objectives” and a “summary of any significant issues raised by the
comments submitted . . . in response to the preliminary regulatory analysis.” Id.
§ 57b-3(b)(2)(B)-(E). Importantly, the preliminary and final regulatory analysis
requirements do not apply to “any amendment to a rule” unless the FTC estimates that
the amendment “will have an annual effect on the national economy of $100,000,000
or more.” Id. § 57b-3(a)(1)(A).
Notice all of the steps. “advance notice of proposed rulemaking”, “notice of proposed rulemaking”, “preliminary regulatory analysis”, “an informal hearing” plus the ability of concerned parties “to submit written data, views, and arguments” to the FTC, and a “final regulatory analysis”. The court draws our attention to the fact that the FTC never did either of the regulatory analysis steps, and points out that they are required.
The FTC had opted out of doing those analyses on the basis that the new rule would have an annual impact of less than a hundred million dollars. The court however notes that this is quite unlikely:
Based on the FTC’s estimate that 106,000 entities currently offer
negative option features and estimated average hourly rates for professionals such as
lawyers, website developers, and data scientists whose services would be required by
many businesses to comply with the new requirements, the ALJ observed that unless
each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the
lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates, the Rule’s compliance costs
would exceed $100 million. Such an estimate was “clearly unrealistically low
inasmuch as there are several new requirements proposed that would require changes
in existing practices and/or disclosure forms.”
Thus the FTC erred when it skipped these steps. The remedy is to vacate:
Section 18 of the FTC Act directs that a reviewing court “shall
hold unlawful and set aside the rule” if it finds agency action to be “without
observance of procedure required by law.” 15 U.S.C. § 57a(e)(3); 5 U.S.C.
§ 706(2)(D). “The ordinary practice is to vacate unlawful agency action.” United
Steel v. Mine Safety & Health Admin., 925 F.3d 1279, 1287 (D.C. Cir. 2019).
This doesn’t mean that the rule is unconstitutional, just that the FTC has to actually do things correctly. The court hasn’t ruled on the law itself because it is moot.
Gotta laugh at the threshold being USD100M costs to the affected businesses without the law taking into account how much the annual costs to consumers are, assuming the continuation of the practices.
Why is that laughable? Congress decided that all rules changes need additional scrutiny if they impose large costs. After all, those costs are eventually going to be passed down to consumers so making overly–complicated rules just ends up hurting consumers. And there has to be _some_ threshold number; they couldn’t just leave that one undefined or nobody would ever bother with the extra steps.
What makes me laugh (sardonically) is that I would have hoped that, as well as considering what the costs are to the suppliers, the law might also have taken into account the size of the injury being suffered by consumers. And that if that injury was large enough then that problem should override concern the cost to the companies that have chosen to use sharp practices in maintaining their revenue flow.
Maybe you saw something in the quoted text that I didn't but I understood the USD100M to mean the costs that would arise due to companies who are currently utilising these practices stopping those practices. There's not an ongoing cost to those companies unless you call the deprivation to them of the revenue they shouldn't be receiving because their customers no longer wish to buy the service a cost.
> After all, those costs are eventually going to be passed down to consumers
And when they are the consumers will be able to stop buying off those companies, well, I mean, as long as they can cancel their subscription.
> After all, those costs are eventually going to be passed down to consumers
No they aren't. The ease with which you can continue to charge consumers without providing value to them directly affects the total amount of those charges (also, profits is a variable)
Suppose I am selling magazine subscriptions. I basically already follow all of the FTC’s new rules, because I’m not trying to cheat. But the new rules are pages and pages of amendments to pages and pages of existing rules. Those rules are complicated and detailed. How can I be _sure_ that _all_ of my marketing materials are compliant with these new rules, which detail exactly what information I must disclose to my customers and potential customers. I have to first understand the new rules, then review all my existing marketing materials, possibly with the aid of legal advice. Maybe I have to reword some things so that I’m using exactly the language specified by the FTC. Changing a website is cheap, but what about my printed materials? I’ve got 6 editions in various stages of completion for each of my dozen different brands.
Those costs are definitely going to be passed along to the consumer in some form or another. Fewer sales, fewer discounts, higher subscription prices, higher advertising prices, thinner magazines, it doesn’t matter. It all flows down to the consumers in the end. I don’t see how you can argue that these costs _can’t_ be passed down to the consumers.
And it’s definitely going to cost more than $1,000. The FTC estimates that there are over a hundred thousands entities offering subscriptions of some kind to customers in the US. 100,000 × $1,000 = $100,000,000. That’s the threshold beyond which rules changes need additional review.
Thank you for linking the actual legal text! (if only it weren't super hard to read due to hard wrapping - one of the reasons why HTML is generally better than PDF)
Gotta pay all those data scientists and lawyers the big bucks in order to figure out how to checks notes stop actively preventing customers from canceling your service when they want to.
I'm happy to consult on this with all those poor businesses for under $100,000,000 in order to help the court vibes feel like the cost isn't over the limit.
I feel confident I can affordably write a few whitepapers and design guidelines to help these poor folks out as they research if there should be a cancel button and if it should work.
With 106,000 companies doing this, that’s less than $1,000 each. Do you think that _your_ company could review all of its marketing materials for compliance with a new FTC rule for less than that? How much would you as a consultant charge one of those companies for your assistance?
But if you don’t like the rule, talk to your local Congresscritter and ask them to propose a bill to amend or remove it. Complaining about it in snarky internet comments isn’t going to get you anywhere.
It's a pro-business decision by the most conservative court in the land, so it would have been surprising if, in all of jurisprudence, they couldn't find something to squash it with, at least temporarily.
The consumer protection laws are so bad the other side of Atlantic.
Most European countries, have their own version of consumer protection agencies, usually any kind of complaint gets sorted out, even if takes a couple months.
If they fail for whatever reason, there is still the top European one.
Most of the time I read about FTC, it appears to side with the wrong guys.
Absolutely. I don't know if it's the FTC or FCC, but the moment I swap back to my American SIM card on trips to the US, I start getting spam texts that I cannot get rid of. Meanwhile I get absolutely zero of these with my European number.
Not the FTC's fault.
The problem is US congress has not functioned for 2 decades. They no longer pass actual laws. This means the FTC is stuck reinterpreting their existing powers to try and squeeze out regulation that they can but that's it.
If the FTC can’t do what the FTC is supposed to do, then that is the FTC’s fault for continuing to exist. It’s unfit for purpose and should be shut down.
The ftc isn’t supposed to create laws though. I tend to overshoot on the consumer’s side, but the ftc is overstepping with actions like this. There should be a law passed on this point and then ftc can enforce. Or ftc can sue based on existing law and let courts buy their interpretation.
True but generally speaking American companies usually have much better customer service and better refund policies than European ones. The issues usually stem when a company corners the market or has no viable alternatives.
So maybe the American way of doing things can also work if a healthy competitive environment is preserved.
The problem lately is that American companies have become monopolies and the formula firms extracting profits or stock hikes for the shareholders dictate that they screw the user up until barely legal territory.
So maybe America can roll without consumer protection laws and agencies if they can fix the business environment.
They just need to find a way out of enshittification, a process US companies perfected.
Delusional.
neoliberal deregulation and regulatory capture, not necessarily in that order, has basically killed federal consumer protection in the US.
And it can get worse. Over shooting right (left) invariably leads to overshoot left (right) which we absolutely do not need either.
The American sense (when we get off our butts and do it) is common sense, slowly changing law that always apportions control in equal parts to accountability.
It's the last part that is more galling (because increasingly we've failed) and ultimately will be the more decisive in any future inflection point.
When has the US actually overshot left though? There was a short period of social justice awareness, but that didn't translate to actual leftwing economic legislation. Even protests and movements with left wing goals were co-opted by the nominally center-right establishment and neutered.
This both-sides stuff gets me, man. Our history is by and large very right wing and every time there's a flutter of left leaning ideas, people chalk it up to some far-left political success and therefore the far right backlash is deserved, as if things ever actually went left in the first place.
They’re talking about those times we let women vote, implemented social security and got rid of Jim Crow. Really overshot lol.
I think the century of American dominance is probably over. Maybe we can fight our way back to having a functional government, maybe not. I think either way our position in the world order is already diminished and will steadily diminish further. I can see a future where America is a strange backwater, reliant on resource extraction and rules over by a grubby and constantly shifting mafia state.
As an American, I would welcome the world without American domination. Or without any single country domination for that matter. Competition of systems is good for the world.
It doesn't need to turn the US into some grubby mafia state. It could, but I think it is unlikely. But the road for both the US and the world IMO goes down before it goes up as many systems and alliances around the world that depend on US domination shift or crumble. My 2c.
If it’s not America it will be China and I don’t think you want to live in that world.
Depends on how far down the US is going to slide. It's sadly well underway to become much, much worse than China is (or will become).
With their population pyramid I doubt it'd stay that way for long, though.
And who would supersede the states by picking up the mantle?
The US wasn’t the dominant superpower due to cooperation or agreement or leadership, it was the result of pure technological force.
Oppenheimer, Teller, and countless nameless others at NASA and Lockheed and Boeing and DARPA.
The US built the best weapons, spy planes, launch vehicles, satellites, and communications systems, and was willing to take a no-holds-barred approach to geopolitical strategy. This led to a circumstance which it seems was unparalleled in history thus far.
Who else is able to commit such technological progress to being able to command the world order by edict?
China, perhaps, but I don’t see the next TSMC or SpaceX or OpenAI or Google starting there. Technology is the name of the game. (My own personal take is that mass scale reusable rockets is the key strategic piece to geopolitical dominance over the next 50-100 years, with perhaps the ability to effectively integrate AI as an alternate or close second.)
It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
> It may be that we never see a monolithic superpower of the same kind again for generations. The post ww2 world order was really very very kind to the USA.
And why do you think it couldn't remain that way? Considering SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google were made far, far closer to today than to WWII, why would the assumption be that the output suddenly stops?
I don't see the neoliberal deregulation you're talking about, so I'll bite.
Regulatory capture I have seen too often e.g. net neutrality getting killed by a Verizon cronie masquerading as a public servant in the FCC. However, from my perspective, it's been mostly conservative powers undoing consumer protections. Unless you mean liberalism in the more European sense, in which case I agree.
I've used a learning platform called Brilliant in the past. The cancellation process was so convoluted that it was impossible to cancel the account. Dark patterns and confusing language.
They refused to refund me and after I thought I'd cancelled and I had to run a charge back from my bank.
This is nefarious behaviour on their part and consumers need to be protected from it.
In contrast in EU, I sent an email to my service to cancel and they forgot to cancel. I just sent them another email with proof of email and they realised they missed the old one and canceled retroactively and refunded money to my account.
Do you mean brilliant.org ?
I call bullshit. https://help.brilliant.org/en/articles/741701-how-can-i-canc...
3rd world country customer protection laws...
One consequence here that people need to think about is that ALL subscription services should be viewed with suspicion. Once you sign up how much of your life will be deranged simply by trying to cancel the service. It's a hidden cost which shouldn't be forgotten.
So there's a business argument for this regulation. If the consumers feel unsafe giving their credit cards to most companies, they'll spend less on subscription services in total, harming the industry more than they gain from milking zombie customers.
The FTC was warned at the time that they were flouting required procedures and that their rule would therefore not survive legal scrutiny. Lo and behold it did not.
Please point to an example of these warnings.
> The FTC is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more. The FTC estimated in a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the rule would not have a $100 million effect.
> But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said. Despite the administrative law judge's finding, the FTC did not conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis and instead "proceeded to issue only the final regulatory analysis alongside the final Rule," the judges' panel said.
It says it in the article
The fact that it takes more than 24 hours to put a 1 click cancel button is alien to me.
You must not work on these sorts of systems. It can easily take more than 24 hours. In case you’re genuinely interested in learning more, here’s how it works.
There are good reasons for it working this way, BTW. The needs of a company with hundreds or thousands of people are different than the needs of hobbyists and early-stage startups.
1. A user experience designer analyzes the user flow and decides where to put the cancellation button. They make decision about style, layout, and wording. This isn’t a ton of work, but something so critical to the company’s business and retention numbers will probably involve a lot of review, discussion, and bike shedding. This could easily take 24 people-hours of work on its own.
2. Somebody programs the front-end change. They probably have to put it behind a feature flag so it’s not visible until the back end is ready.
3. Somebody programs the back-end. They think about security, authentication, authorization, CSRF. That’s probably handled, but again, this is a critical feature and deserves extra care.
4. Somebody programs the interface to the company’s internal systems. They’re usually kind of a pain to work with. Billing, marketing, support, customer success. Something probably sends an email to the user. Maybe there’s a follow up flow to try to get them back with a special offer a month later. Etc.
5. The change is tested. Preferably with automated tests, but a feature like this has tendrils into systems throughout the company, and a lot of moving parts, so manual testing is also important. If it goes wrong, it’s a big deal, involving the potential for chargebacks and lawsuits, both of which are expensive at scale.
Throughout all this, you’re dealing with legacy code, because billing is one of the oldest systems the company has, and the one with the most risk of change, so the code is nasty and doesn’t follow current conventions. Every change is painful and tedious.
It’s alien to you that this could take more than 24 hours? At any company of size, I have trouble imagining it taking less.
Well, after you factor in some of these companies are probably large corps with layers of middle management. It will probably require at least 3 months of premeetings
Which explains the issue with the law neatly:
1. Not pegged at inflation, so the threshold is continually moving downward. 2. All it takes is a couple of bad actor companies to blow out the threshold. If you take the companies at their word, then you will never get under this threshold. Why trust them?
Why are you pasting the article when it doesn't include any warnings that were given to the ftc at the time?
Because systematic corruption presumably?
More that they mistakenly thought that doing the right thing meant they didn't have to do the thing right.
But, if you want to make it look like you are doing the right thing but don't want to be remembered as having done that right thing, maybe this was the right thing to do given that now it won't be done.
Right, if they were screwing over customers, we’d call it disruption and give them a medal, if not $1 billion dollars. Since they’re trying to help people, we wag our fingers at them.
>they were flouting required procedures
If you are sniffing out corruption, aren’t the ones flouting required procedures likely the corrupt ones?
Almost never.
Whistleblowers are almost always revealing information that they are legally prevented from revealing, otherwise you wouldn’t need a whistleblower. A simple FOIA request would suffice.
What if the “required procedures” are held in place by corruption?
Kinda, but corruption in my favor is unlikely to see me complain about it.
That’s obviously no justification, all corruption is in someone’s favour. Society functions by rules. Break those founding principles and you break everything.
who warned them?
A then-commissioner who is now the head of the FTC.
That commissioner also hated the fact that consumers were going to stop being robbed by big corps.
For those of you wondering what the actual decision says: <https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/25/07/243137P.pdf>
I always felt like those click to unsubscribe links were nothing more than a "please prove to us with certainty that this is an actively used account so we can set a sticky bit on it and sell that info for $$$"
That’s a commonly held idea for spam emails. This is about services you’ve signed up and pay for on a recurring basis, and was targeted at companies who make it very easy to open an account, but then require byzantine methods to cancel.
That is a valid paranoia,
but also, not the kind of subscription the article is about.
just mark them as spam, hurts them more and doesnt notify them of anything.
FYI: Everyone just use privacy.com
It allows you to make virtual cards that are single use.
So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will automatically decline.
Until the powers that be gets its act together and stops allowing businesses to run all over us...this is the way.
> So if a merchant keeps trying to charge you, it will automatically decline.
I learned this the hard way with the New York Times doing this, but merchants can “force settle” a transaction if they want and it’ll override the decline they get. This is a violation of the merchant agreement but companies do it anyway (like NYT did to me). Privacy isn’t as bullet-proof as you would think.
Yes, Capital One offers a similar virtual card service and when I read into the fine details it wasn't as useful as a thought. There were seemingly exceptions that could override spending limits for subscriptions and the control was mostly an illusion.
How could it override the decline if you cancel the card entirely in Privacy?
Privacy.com is a fintech platform offering virtual debit cards to secure online transactions. Based in Iceland and partnered with FDIC-insured banks, the service allows users to control card usage through pausing, unpausing, or closing. Privacy.com prioritizes security through firewalls, encryption, and PCI DSS compliance.
> Privacy.com prioritizes security through firewalls, encryption, and PCI DSS compliance.
That line of cyber security mumbo jumbo does not inspire confidence
Then you risk getting sent to collections instead.
Is there anything like this that accepts EU customers?
Revolut along with quite a few other modern EU banks let you manage recurring billing directly - in Revolut I can pick any transaction in the app, click "Block future payments" and that vendor won't be able to bill my card again until I unblock them. That's separate from virtual/disposable cards - you can use your normal card and still block individual vendors.
Honestly this seems like a pretty obvious core banking feature nowadays, I'm surprised it's not more widespread (even in the US - reliable cancellation features across all recurring card payments would surely make people more comfortable with subscriptions). Under the hood all banks (AFAIK) are handle recurring payments by issuing an authorization token at first purchase, and validating it on later transactions. Allowing customers to see the list of active tokens that were recently used and then revoke them explicitly seems like a no brainer.
Revolut has a disposable card feature. I'm sure there's some regular old school banks that have this as well, ING in the Netherlands does as far as I remember.
revolut and others still try to charge you, even if you cancel the VIRTUAL card. when you ask them, why and how they you do that, they say you have some sort of agreement for the subs. service and you need to end it on your own via them. Bank can't do that?? they said something like that to me. So they literally support the dark pattent side, not on your side obv.
Your bank might offer this already, just to check in case you haven't already. I think all banks I've had in Spain and Sweden has offered this feature within their web portal.
Never heard of this; thanks for the tip!
Great, another service that collects my purchase information.
This is why I've never used these services.
Severing contracts for me, not for thee.
[flagged]
From a different article [1]:
> But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit said the FTC erred in its rulemaking process by failing to produce a preliminary regulatory analysis, a statutory requirement for rules whose annual effect on the national economy would exceed $100 million.
> The FTC had argued that it was not required to prepare the preliminary analysis because its initial estimate of the rule’s impact on the national economy was under the $100 million threshold — even though ultimately the presiding officer determined the impact exceeded the threshold.
This is a case where congress really did pass a concrete law, and the court is requiring the FTC to follow it. Sucks that a reasonable rule is getting voided for the sloppiness but I really don't think the courts are indefensibly out of line.
[1] https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5390731-appeals-court-...
It's interesting that businesses can build an obviously toxic subscription model that robs consumers of both money and time, but when asked to change it now we have to consider their costs.
I understand the idea behind the threshold for changing rules but this still feels very broken. There is a constant struggle of having to do everything perfectly to make any positive progress, but bad actors can operate however they like with seemingly little repercussions.
While I share your frustration, I don't think we should lower the bar for positive progress. Because that's how one becomes a bad actor themselves.
The bar should be where changes happen to move in the correct direction easily, while moving in the incorrect direction harder. If the rule was to "force companies to have confusing cancel processes", the rulemaking process would have zero burdens, because the "potential gains" of doing so would be enormous.
I think we should absolutely lower this particular bar.
When bad actors have a low bar but good actors have a high bar, the country is bound to collapse. Look at how many rules the current regime is flouting. But the other side has to dot every i for some reason.
Are we still talking about click-to-cancel here? There aren't 'other sides' in any meaningful sense on this sort of administrative decision. There is a solid consensus that people shouldn't have to pay for subscriptions they don't want and a couple of broadly inconsequential points to debate on how to implement it.
This is exactly the sort of situation where just following all the rules and procedures is fine and it doesn't, within a pretty broad range of outcomes, who gets final say.
The "other side" here is the political group that is consistently anti-regulation, anti-consumer, anti-government.
I am not getting it. The rule makes competition in markets higher. Because dollars flow to best offers faster. And thus improve economic situation, not only in markets affected by rule, but also on all other markets, in case customer wants to take his money elsewhere.
And on international scale, because more competitive companies presumably out-compete foreign competitors.
So, FTC needs some permission and review to make national economy money?
The FTC was not given unlimited rule-making power by Congress, and has to live within the power granted to them.
Issuing an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) and conducting a regulatory analysis for certain rules are examples of such limits. The FTC did not follow the second (as was required) in this case.
Whether I happen to agree with the change they enacted (I do) doesn’t change the fact that I want my government agencies to follow the rules laid out for them. Because as surely as the sun rises in the east, sooner or later they’ll propose a rule I don’t agree with and I want there to be a lawful process and framework in place then, and therefore also now.
A major unwritten rule of american society is that there is no bigger crime than economic friction to the shareholder... including statute itself.
Devil is in the details, they said each company would have to pay for less than 23 hrs to a low level engineer to avoid the $100 mil impact.
How much time do you think an intern would need to render a button on screen that says "cancel" in red mapped to an already implemented function in the code base. Especially with trillions poured into the AI?
This is non sense and horse shit, and these bench full of idiots know it
There’s a non trivial chance this interacts with credit card processing. There is also app the legal liability of you tell someone meet are cancelled and continue charging them. So probably so not something you trust an intern to do.
This is stuff that companies already handle with their current cancellation pipelines. Hooking up a short circuit that flags whatever user in their DB as having cancelled is something that I would absolutely toss a junior engineer at and expect them to finish in three or so working days, maybe slightly longer.
The only way it's more onerous than that is if companies have an absolutely shit design under the hood, or they're using malicious compliance to argue that this feature specifically needs eight weeks of planning poker and at least five senior engineers to sign off on each iteration of the design phase.
These “bench full of idiots” are not blind to the fact that there are deceptive practices regarding subscriptions. FTC didn’t do their job right unfortunately and here we are. Now, new administration and it’s doubtful this will get picked up again barring any law passed by Congress.
It sounds like they did their job fine. 23 hours on average is plenty. Most companies can do this in 2 hours, and a few of them can spend a lot longer.
Your argument presumes that “cost” is “money spent to implement,” when in reality any reduction in predicted revenue is also a “cost.”
The cost of allowing people to cancel subscriptions is more than the cost to implement a button.
From googling apparently the "presiding officer" is appointed by the FTC chair. So it sounds like the FTC spiked its own case.
It was Lina Khan. She just felt strongly about going out the way she came in — losing every single case.
Illumina, Tapestry, Kroger, Lockheed Martin would disagree.
Also, didn’t she „build“ the right to repair laws?
The U.S. Court of Appeals has therefore quantified the severity of this issue.
Typical decel nonsense to add all these preliminary analyses. This is CEQA/NEPA type garbage.
Fortunately, California law should be unaffected by this and that will probably be sufficient.
Normally I'm aligned but this is sort of a NEPA rule making sticking a monkeywrench in the gears creating new regulations, so I'm not totally opposed to the principle, as irritating as it is here.
Convincing. I guess I was thinking at step 1 deceleration but this actually depowers step 1 deceleration.
Ideally, we don't have all these structures slowing down societal adaptation. It's like we anneal over time, and that makes us brittle. We need to always be ready to bend to a new wind.
I should be able to go into my bank or card service online. View a list of all my subscriptions. Click on a subscription (or select all). And cancel.
If there is a card that offers this let me know because I'll be switching immediately.
You can absolutely do this in India. Every card based subscription requires an explicit authorization to set up. And every such authorized subscription can be seen in the bank app/site. You can choose to cancel those subscriptions at the bank end and the subscribed services will fail their next renewal. This is not just a service specific thing and is required by regulation for all recurring payments, incl utility bills, insurance premia, entertainment service, cloud services.
Not gonna lie, I actually have canceled many service because of this single reason. If I get the feeling they want to hide these options specifically to keep me in a subscription, I immediately feel the urge to cancel even more, and also it gives me the feeling that the service itself is obviously, objectively, not good enough that they can just be honest and offer a easy cancel option - because they fear that too many people would.
You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial but sorry to tell you that "most" people is "forgot" they sign up something and not open it in years
that's happen more often than you think
also financial illiterate is real
> You are absolute minority that conscious about your financial
Maybe but idk. I have calendar events for every single monthly expense & BNPL. Anything that isn't on-demand is in the calendar. That makes it easy to calculate future expenses and also serves as a reminder of what I'm paying for so I can cancel anything I don't think I'll need for a while. At least one subscription I've canceled and restarted a lot because I use it a bunch and then don't use it at all and then use it a bunch again and so on.
I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into, because it gives me an easy way to see how my finances are doing and also gives me a way to keep track of charges that aren't properly descriptive on their own (for example, "wl *steam purchase" doesn't say which product was purchased; on the spreadsheet, I can see exactly, as well as for every other transaction, what I purchased, without having to look at each individual order). It's also faster to check than having to log into my bank, which ever since I switched to Mac has been forcing me through SMS verification every single time I log in no matter what.
Sir, sorry to inform, but you do this:
> I also have a spreadsheet that I log every transaction into
You are a minority in a minority that tracks at all! ;)
Legally, this isn't sufficient. Your subscription contract is independent of your payment method. If you don't pay, that doesn't necessarily mean that your subscription is cancelled, and you could end up in court and lose.
What is necessary is regulatory (or statutory) enforcement of easy, online notice of cancellation, without a company able to frustrate you giving them (and them recording and acknowledging) that notice.
You can use privacy.com as another commenter has written. But one catch is I believe you can be on the hook for subscriptions where your card no longer works but you haven't cancelled your subscription. So they can send you invoices and even send it to collections. Although I strongly feel that at least for transactions of a sufficiently small size (normal retail subscriptions) cancelling your card should be legally considered sufficient enough for voiding your future subscription. I'm open to hearing counter arguments but I think the consumer shouldn't have to jump through even the smallest of hoops setup by vendors in order to indicate that they are no longer interested in future transactions.
I always try via official means, but, failing that, I just cancel the (virtual) card. I have been threatened a lot that if I do that, my first born will be punished etc but of course nothing ever happens. I don't live in the US though.
This type of activity is happening with Amazon Netflix and other medias also with various E-Commerce sites Apple particularly is asking for all particulars train to debit after the expiry of the period but is not allowing cancellation properly as the bandwth work remains down in many many areas sporadically we are not able to cancel at will.This is a user unfriendly activity which is monopolistic or coercive.People will lose faith in digitization slowly
use an alias with an alias email, the Privacy.com card will accept any name and address. Never had any sort of issue in all the years using them
Simply move to Australia, all the major banks here offer this service: https://payto.com.au/
Not all services offer this yet, but it's gaining momentum, especially with Amazon now offering it for non-subscriptions.
I had a recurring charge on my Capital One credit card and canceled it from my Capital One app. The next month, the charge went through again and they proactively gave me an account credit equal to the charged amount, with an emailed apology. I'm not sure why they couldn't cancel it, or if it will go through again this month, but it surprised me!
I had a subscription with an account that I couldn’t access anymore, and there wasn’t any other way to cancel
So I contested the charge through the bank. They would refund me, but then the company would charge me again for the subscription
This went on for several months. At some point the card expired, the bank automatically sent me a new card, and somehow the company was still able to charge the subscription to my new card, even though I couldn’t even access my account
It was a couple of years ago, and I don’t remember how I finally stopped it. But it was kinda shocking to me to see the charges “jump” through different cards. Especially given that usually any service that I don’t want cancelled, gets immediately cancelled if my card on file expires
Credit cards explicitly do a type of forwarding so that your old subscriptions continue to work if you get a new card. If you ever tell your bank that you've lost your card or had it stolen then they will reissue it differently without that "forward" feature, to prevent fraudulent activity. I learned this when I had fraudulent activity on my card and they accidentally did a normal reissue, and so the fraudulent activity continued even after I got the new card.
The company doesn't actually keep your card details at all (at least, all reputable companies). They take the details to the payment processor at first purchase, but they then get swapped for a token which can be used to process transactions (usable only for transactions to you by this one vendor, so tokens can't be stolen/leaked, unlike card details) and then future transactions all just use the token.
When your card details change, all issued tokens generally stay valid, they're effectively independent. A payment card is basically an initial authentication process for the account, it's not really the payment method.
Thats how it works in India: all your "repeating" charge authorizations show up on a portal maintained by the issuing bank. All services that charge via these authorizations send an SMS alert before they debit the next charge. At any time, you can go into the portal and cancel any of these authorizations. No need to talk to the charging co at all, though still, best to first cancel from them. Jus that they know its trivial for the user to go and cancel the auth, so no one makes it difficult to cancel.
Here in the Netherlands, via my bank I can list all of my pre-approved transfers and block them. I'm pretty sure every bank here is required to support this. PayPal also has this feature.
I recently had to cut down on expenses starting with extraneous subscriptions and charitable donations, of which I had dozens. Many ad a click-to-cancel or at least fill-out-a-form-to-cancel process, but some of them said 'call us'. Then I discovered that I could cut them all off from my side!
I got a few 'hey your donation stopped' messages, and answered the first ones, but they all eventually went away.
Be careful there. You can block further payments, but that won't necessarily cancel your subscription.
You may still be responsible for the payment, and may need to pay collection fees as well at that point.
I work for a company called Subaio that does exactly that, but it only works because EU (and some other countries) consumer protection laws requires that companies have to let us cancel subscriptions. So we're mostly working with european banks for now.
The protection specifically requires that cancelling is at least as easy as signing up.
Could you point me to some European banks that integrate your product? My current bank doesn't have something similar, and I would like to have an option to view all my subscriptions at a glance
In theory I can do this with standing orders / direct debit in the UK and there are some subscriptions where "cancelling the direct debit" is the official way to cancel. There should be no need for firms to reinvent recurring payments and store card details for their own ad hoc system. I don't know if it might disadvantage some people not familiar with managing direct debits though.
However, many years ago, after an hour on hold failing to cancel Virgin ADSL I just cancelled the direct debit instead. They put a debt recovery firm on me! The direct debit was charged at the start of each billing period so it wasn't a non payment thing. I recall there used to be more indefensible "notice periods" for cancellation which were just pure scummy ways to force feed unwanted services but I don't think this had one.
I use privacy.com for this.
(Not affiliated, just a satisfied customer.)
I wasn't able to jump through their hoops to sign up. They wanted my bank login, which I will absolutely not give to anyone. I tried a debit card but that also failed.
Revolut does that, at least in France. You can see and cancel both card subscriptions and direct debits
Any subscriptions that are paid through Apple Pay are like this. Apple also takes about a third of the money for the trouble.
This is _not_ the same as using the Apple credit card for a subscription.
Feels like a killer feature just waiting for someone to nail it properly
What about subscriptions where you agreed to a long-term subscription (e.g. for a discounted rate)?
Those are usually charged once per agreed period (never seen it any other way)
Adobe is an example where a yearly discounted subscription is billed monthly
They'll have to change their model or implement like a breakup fee depending of what would has been missed if you didn't have a discount.
Yes there is https://www.privacy.com/ which gives you a unique virtual credit card per subscription, which you can cancel from the bank.
Nowadays a problem is the subscriptions are all multiplexed through apple, google, and amazon.
I used to religiously use things like ynab, but now I need to find ways to export my amazon transactions, google play, etc. It's nearly impossible, and it makes me feel completely out of control.
That... doesn't necessarily work though?
If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.
> If I tried that with my gym, they would send me to collections.
Let them. I don't know why people let services abuse them like this.
This would be illegal in western countries.
I'd have different wallets for everything if everything took Bitcoin. I guess I could do that with generated credit card numbers but haven't bothered with it.
Spectrum (cable/telephone/internet) kept me on the phone line for 30 minutes as i tried to cancel.
Ask my girlfriend about my phone call with Time Warner (pre Spectrum) where I said the words "I want to cancel cable TV but keep internet" about two dozen times to 3 different people.
My favorite underappreciated aspect of the iOS app store is its absolutely friction-free cancellation.
It makes me much more willing to trial a subscription service because I know I won't have to spend an hour of my life on the phone with a lovely Filipino man to stop that service.
This. My iPhone is still a pleasure to use, everyday. But perhaps I can only appreciate this because I was an android user for years.
The killer app for me on iPhone? Files. I literally switched from iPhone 3 to android because it didn’t have a file manager! Thankfully I came back.
It was the opposite journey for me. I never felt for once that it was my iPhone, perhaps because I was an android user for years.
Apparently Google Play has the same cancellation mechanism.
That and the reminder emails from Apple.
It is one reason that with this switch allowing apps to send me outside of Apple's Ecosystem to subscribe, I hope that developers realize that if they make this the only option there are likely many people like myself that just won't subscribe to your app. I am far more likely to try a subscription that costs a couple dollars a month if it is through the app store instead of through some random website.
Google Play also has that if you subscribe through there (which might be more expensive because of the fee Google takes), plus an easier refund system if you subscribe to something and decide it's not worth paying it
The FTC failed to comply with 15 U.S.C. § 57b-3(b)(1), which states that the agency “shall issue a preliminary regulatory analysis” whenever it proposes a rule expected to have a significant economic impact.
After its own ALJ found the rule’s effect would exceed $100 million annually, the FTC was obligated to publish an analysis of the “projected benefits and any adverse economic effects and any other effects” and the effectiveness of alternatives, as required by § 57b-3(b)(1)(C).
I wonder who's on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals...
Bush 41: 2
Bush 43: 6
Obama: 1
Trump: 4
oh
If 2025 conservatives could read they would be very upset with you.
Disputing charges through banks will become the way to cancel things.
Honestly, it's wild that something as common-sense as "make canceling as easy as signing up" is this hard to implement
It's not hard to implement, in the sense of "hard to implement software feature".
It's hard because businesses don't want cancellation to be easy, as they lose money. A lot of people forget to cancel or just can't be bothered for a long time, especially if cancellation is hard.
And yes, it's as predatory as it sounds.
It's basically the financialization of business, as some point one of the few ways towards "growth" is nickel-and-diming everyone you can.
Here is an idea, make your service value for money and people will not want to cancel.
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel then your product needs to be improved.
You just offended siriusxm, every newspaper, and every gym in the country.
Don't forget swimming pool season pass.
I will buy my next season pass when I have a history of entry transactions that proves I could have saved by buying one...
Man what the fuck is it with gyms? I'm not even in the US, but even in the Netherlands where these kind of things are generally super simple and hassle-free (by law) I've had some nightmarish, headache inducing situations with gyms. I've literally never encountered anything else, ever, nearly as bad as dealing with gyms and their contracts in my entire life. It was a million times easier closing brokerage accounts with decent chunks of money in them than it was to cancel a gym membership I once had.
WaPo and NYT were both very easy to cancel.
WaPo was easy when I canceled last November. The lost time I canceled a NYT subscription, it still required a phone call.
They say it requires a phone call but amazingly an email that's says you will charge back any future charge works too.
Almost like they can do it without the phone or something.
Office365. I only have it because it’s necessary for work not because I want to use the product.
If your product is so poor that the only way you can retain customers is to make it too hard for them to cancel, then your business model should be illegal.
Ok, but also, I just want to stop paying for things sometimes.
Subscribing to a services isn't a vow of "until death do us part" and I don't want businesses trying to act like it is or make it so.
That is a novel idea! But ironically it is not actually the issue that was in front of the court.
The time to unsubscribe is now!
Of course it's going to cost more than $100 million if they have stop stealing from us.
Corporate Republicans hate red tape and regulation for business but love it for starngling government and the poor (they just added huge onoreous red tape to medicaid and food stamp recipients because they absolutely hate their fellow americans).
The 8th circuit court of appeals is the most conservative, with only one judge appointed by a Democratic president.
What about the earlier administrative judge who warned FTC they were ignoring established rules when it was reviewed the first time, then FTC proceeded to ignore that judge and passed it anyway, which resulted it in being in front of this appeals court?
If we had a Congress who knew what Signal, e-mail, or credit cards were, then we may get actual legislation protecting consumer rights.
The USA is not a country for the people. It’s a country for the rich and powerful.
The game is rigged and enough deluded people think they can "game" it as well.
This was pretty well established by the constitution, only you left out white male from your rich and powerful. It took amendments to get past white and male.
While it’s true US was quite good on equality amongst this particular group. What we have now is quite different from it.
Our culture is an unfortunate nexus between strong contract enforcement and weak consumer protections.
Sure it is. Corporations are people too and laws like these take away their freedoms!
Dark pattern galore
"after finding that the commission behind it failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process."
I hope the FTC tries to re-submit the rule while following procedure - click-to-cancel is really good for consumers... but not enough to justify trying to break laws to pass it.
You realize the current FTC is not the same FTC that did this? There’s no way this FTC does anything in favor of consumers
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44504694
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This is the definition of an ad hominem attack. If you want to prove the judges are partisan, talk about the flaws in the ruling, not who appointed them.
That's the problem that automatically arises when the justice system is made out of political appointments instead of career tracks.
There will always be the suspicion of political bias, and the haphazard way the administrations ever since Obama went in how nominations were done adds more fuel to the fire.
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Did you read the article? "Procedures weren't followed."
Seems like an almost intentional mistake tbh
Procedures can only be ignored for the purpose of installing a police state. Not for consumer benefit.
Yeah not a great article. "failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process" but no real details on what the procedures require that the commission did not do.
A trivial search will get you the court opinion itself <https://ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/25/07/243137P.pdf>, so regardless of how bad the news article is you should not be uninformed.
From the abstract:
A more detailed explanation: Notice all of the steps. “advance notice of proposed rulemaking”, “notice of proposed rulemaking”, “preliminary regulatory analysis”, “an informal hearing” plus the ability of concerned parties “to submit written data, views, and arguments” to the FTC, and a “final regulatory analysis”. The court draws our attention to the fact that the FTC never did either of the regulatory analysis steps, and points out that they are required.The FTC had opted out of doing those analyses on the basis that the new rule would have an annual impact of less than a hundred million dollars. The court however notes that this is quite unlikely:
Thus the FTC erred when it skipped these steps. The remedy is to vacate: This doesn’t mean that the rule is unconstitutional, just that the FTC has to actually do things correctly. The court hasn’t ruled on the law itself because it is moot.Thanks for the analysis.
Gotta laugh at the threshold being USD100M costs to the affected businesses without the law taking into account how much the annual costs to consumers are, assuming the continuation of the practices.
Why is that laughable? Congress decided that all rules changes need additional scrutiny if they impose large costs. After all, those costs are eventually going to be passed down to consumers so making overly–complicated rules just ends up hurting consumers. And there has to be _some_ threshold number; they couldn’t just leave that one undefined or nobody would ever bother with the extra steps.
What makes me laugh (sardonically) is that I would have hoped that, as well as considering what the costs are to the suppliers, the law might also have taken into account the size of the injury being suffered by consumers. And that if that injury was large enough then that problem should override concern the cost to the companies that have chosen to use sharp practices in maintaining their revenue flow.
Maybe you saw something in the quoted text that I didn't but I understood the USD100M to mean the costs that would arise due to companies who are currently utilising these practices stopping those practices. There's not an ongoing cost to those companies unless you call the deprivation to them of the revenue they shouldn't be receiving because their customers no longer wish to buy the service a cost.
> After all, those costs are eventually going to be passed down to consumers
And when they are the consumers will be able to stop buying off those companies, well, I mean, as long as they can cancel their subscription.
> After all, those costs are eventually going to be passed down to consumers
No they aren't. The ease with which you can continue to charge consumers without providing value to them directly affects the total amount of those charges (also, profits is a variable)
Suppose I am selling magazine subscriptions. I basically already follow all of the FTC’s new rules, because I’m not trying to cheat. But the new rules are pages and pages of amendments to pages and pages of existing rules. Those rules are complicated and detailed. How can I be _sure_ that _all_ of my marketing materials are compliant with these new rules, which detail exactly what information I must disclose to my customers and potential customers. I have to first understand the new rules, then review all my existing marketing materials, possibly with the aid of legal advice. Maybe I have to reword some things so that I’m using exactly the language specified by the FTC. Changing a website is cheap, but what about my printed materials? I’ve got 6 editions in various stages of completion for each of my dozen different brands.
Those costs are definitely going to be passed along to the consumer in some form or another. Fewer sales, fewer discounts, higher subscription prices, higher advertising prices, thinner magazines, it doesn’t matter. It all flows down to the consumers in the end. I don’t see how you can argue that these costs _can’t_ be passed down to the consumers.
And it’s definitely going to cost more than $1,000. The FTC estimates that there are over a hundred thousands entities offering subscriptions of some kind to customers in the US. 100,000 × $1,000 = $100,000,000. That’s the threshold beyond which rules changes need additional review.
> I don’t see how you can argue that these costs _can’t_ be passed down to the consumers.
Because you've ignored the profits factor and have supposed away the other factor I mentioned as part of your hypothetical
Thank you for linking the actual legal text! (if only it weren't super hard to read due to hard wrapping - one of the reasons why HTML is generally better than PDF)
Gotta pay all those data scientists and lawyers the big bucks in order to figure out how to checks notes stop actively preventing customers from canceling your service when they want to.
I'm happy to consult on this with all those poor businesses for under $100,000,000 in order to help the court vibes feel like the cost isn't over the limit.
I feel confident I can affordably write a few whitepapers and design guidelines to help these poor folks out as they research if there should be a cancel button and if it should work.
With 106,000 companies doing this, that’s less than $1,000 each. Do you think that _your_ company could review all of its marketing materials for compliance with a new FTC rule for less than that? How much would you as a consultant charge one of those companies for your assistance?
But if you don’t like the rule, talk to your local Congresscritter and ask them to propose a bill to amend or remove it. Complaining about it in snarky internet comments isn’t going to get you anywhere.
> Complaining about it in snarky internet comments isn’t going to get you anywhere.
In what fantasy land is the following any different?
> talk to your local Congresscritter and ask them to propose a bill to amend or remove it
You have 2 trump appointees and George hw bush appointee.
Were you expecting respectable and proper jurisprudence? I'm not any more.
It's a pro-business decision by the most conservative court in the land, so it would have been surprising if, in all of jurisprudence, they couldn't find something to squash it with, at least temporarily.
Or motivated reasoning for the court to reach the outcome it wanted.
"Calvinball"
If someone needs a new boat and the ruling prevents that then it must be stricken.
They just follow the party line, so look further at the party for the explanation