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Comment by tuxychandru | Hacker News Reader

Why is it still the norm in the US to allow companies to charge their customers whenever they please, without the customers having any control?

In India, businesses are required to get a consent, at the time of subscription, to charge the customer on a recurring basis. This is called an e-mandate and requires multi-factor authentication to create. The card holder can cancel the mandate online, through their bank, without having to rely on the business doing the right thing. The business cannot charge the customer beyond that point, without obtaining a new mandate.

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When you sign up, you are agreeing to the contract ("I agree to the terms and conditions"). Those terms and conditions legally dictate what you are agreeing to and how you will be charged, and what conditions are necessary to break that contract.

They aren't allowed to charge you whenever they please, without customer control, they have to abide by the contract. Unfortunately, most people don't read the contract, and companies put ridiculous terms in there that people happily agree to.

This is what Netflix's Terms of Use says, "If a payment is not successfully settled, due to expiration, insufficient funds, or otherwise, and you do not cancel your account, we may suspend your access to the service until we have successfully charged a valid Payment Method.".

A customer will be well within the bounds of the contract if they cancel their mandate through the bank, as long as they also don't expect to have continued access to Netflix.

Even in the US, there is nothing stopping the customer from closing their credit card account, except that it is an unreasonably inconvenient for the customer. It is far simpler and IMO sensible to be able to revoke consent for specific purposes through my payment instrument. So why doesn't the banking system in the US provide this as an universal option to customers? After all, this is exactly what Apple facilitates albeit at a high cost.

Re-read that closely. You still owe them the money, they aren't absolving you of the debt. Netflix seems content not to pursue customers for it, but there is nothing legally stopping them from coming after you for the amount you agreed to pay until you formally cancel. Thats the rub. Access suspension != account cancellation.

You can ask a US bank to stop future payments to a given merchant, but it doesn't actually absolve you of your contractual agreement to pay the merchant. Most internet based services have decided that it is bad business to pursue accounts where the payment was unsuccessful, but from a legal perspective, you are still on the hook.

I'm not saying I agree with the way the US system handles this, but to say that "the norm in the US to allow companies to charge their customers whenever they please, without the customers having any control" is inaccurate since customers have agreed to the terms of the contract which define when the customer is charged and what control they have.

"Unfortunately, most people don't read the contract"

Unfortunately, we lack laws to mandate easy-to-understand terms of service that highlight the most important information in a way that actually serves the people instead of businesses.

It's not unfortunate that most people don't read contracts - it's unfortunate that services create such dense contracts int their defense, knowing full well no one reads them.

I propose the following: a ToS is accompanied by an audio transcription playing at average speaking speed. A person can only use the service after the whole thing plays. We'd quickly see a race for short ToS.

Or maybe require layers to accept ToS. If lawyers wrote them, maybe it would be helpful for a lawyer to read them to consumers! They could even amend it and negotiate changes with the service provider - maybe the terms are not compatible with their client's Terms of Consuming.

These are just joke scenarios, but they show the power imbalance between service and consumer.

It's not and 99% of the time it's blatant user error. Like the guys top post that is refusing to believe his father slammed the re-subscribe button when sharing his account with him.

The example from the top post sure I may give some leeway, but there are plenty of subscription services where it is clearly multiples of effort more difficult to cancel than to subscribe. Common example being - can only cancel over the phone after being told 10 reasons by a sales rep as to why you should continue to pay. This is not down to user-error, this is blatantly trying to fraud your users.

Because the stock price must go up at any cost, and part of that cost is lobbying to remove both worker protections and consumer protections.

It's not that malicious. Product people work on this, and overoptimize these flows. They do this to get promoted.

That's it - it's just managing to the metrics gone wrong, writ large.

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