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The effect of this bill is probably that it will either never be enforced or companies will terminate business in Pennsylvania, at least until more jurisdictions adopt compatible rules. At best companies would only offer these rights for Pennsylvania residents. Local legislation seems incompatible with the economies of scale of internet commerce. I wish that rather than creating laws like this that only govern a tiny percentage of people, local jurisdictions would enter a pact to do so in unison before making an actual law. In the mean time, global companies are getting more brazen about ignoring compliance when there are literally hundreds of authorities they must in theory obey.

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ATT Wireless currently offers online cancellations only if you are in New York. These laws help.

The fact that you only get this if you are a resident of a single state is part of my point. The law is good, but having each state exert its own rules is a lot of regulatory friction.

There's only regulatory friction if a company is dragging their heels with regards to compliance and putting in extra effort to comply only with the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. For example, once you've implemented Click to Cancel for one state, it is less work to provide that capability to all of your customers than to keep track of who you are required to offer it to.

So when a company chooses the more complicated route to minimal compliance, that's strong evidence that the regulation in question is effective at reducing their illicit gains and would be effective elsewhere.

Once a few do it, it’ll be more likely:

1. that it may be cost effective just to do everywhere

2. that federal legislators will take note that it is popular

A lot of new laws in the US gain popularity at the state level before becoming national law.

I find it fascinating that there are more than 11,000 tax jurisdictions in the USA[0]. I think the comparison is interesting, as I'm sure many of these are ignored by many online retailers. It seems like there are some efforts at standardizing Sales Tax approaches across the country. Similar efforts could be interesting for consumer protections.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/state-sales-tax-jurisdictions-in-t...

That’s 11,000 jurisdictions just for sales tax. There are many other jurisdictions not listed there that impose other types of taxes.

> companies will terminate business in Pennsylvania

It's a fairly populous state at over 4% of the US total, I can't imagine national companies nixing PA.

I think ignoring it is more likely. Imagine instead every jurisdiction enacting similar unique laws. You'd have ~25 things to comply with.

We already see this - have you read the disclaimers on loans? Many will have a call out for California, Wisconsin, and South Dakota if I remember correctly, as those states have certain things required or prohibited.

Any online store dealing with gun or gun-adjacent stuff already has been dealing with variations of these for years; knives that are illegal in certain areas, etc.

Home Depot has to block shipping gas-powered lawn equipment to CA now.

Are these frictions good for either businesses or consumers? What is wrong with the desire that a good consumer protection protection be rolled out nationally rather that state by state?

It's a good goal but it's also surprisingly hard to pass, much of these things are actually handled at the state level and for the feds to step in requires exercising the commerce clause, which always causes a fight.

That’s why there are efforts like the Uniform Commercial Code to harmonize basic laws across all 50 states. Unfortunately many aspects of it are stacked against consumers like UCITA that enables abusive software licensing practices.

More work for lawyers and not a problem: cost of doing business that will be passed on to you.

The state of Pennsylvania governs a much larger population than just a bunch of local jurisdictions acting in unison. Unless you mean entire countries by "local jurisdictions."

Pennsylvania is less than 4% of the US population. That's a really small piece and it wouldn't be sustainable if every jurisdiction that small enacted different rules

Amazon would love it, as it would begin to crush smaller retailers and they have the capacity to handle dealing with various law differences.

The federal government is too dysfunctional to pass this sort of obvious legislation. They protected their video rental records within a year after Bork was smeared. Dark financial patterns? That's just too hard to do.

If the federal legislature is not elected on a platform having to do with quality-of-life issues then obviously they will not work on that or be held accountable to it.

They do. Some other states already have easy cancel laws.

If a business is so small that this would be hard to manage, then they're probably not big enough to have MBAs rubbing their hands and implementing impossible to cancel systems. If a business is so big that it can afford to pay call centers to deal with their intentionally Kafkaesque cancellations, then they can afford to deal with the regulations. They can't as easily afford to lose 12 million customers.

Easy canceling is far, far easier to make than the stuff these regulations target. No honest mom and pop shop is losing sleep over this.

PA is also the 5th most populous state. 90% of US states are smaller in population.

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