New California law requires one-click subscription cancellations
thedesk.net
thedesk.net
I live in France, and they do everything possible to make subscriptions hard to cancel - I signed up to my gym online, but if I want to cancel it I need to send their headquarters a physical letter in the post, and expect a 4-6 week processing time haha.
Went to the three _main_ commercial gym brands, and cancelling did NOT take more than a week including the letter arriving time in one case. The other two were online and with the branch staff.
I think some companies have already complied with this law ahead of time.
Started by clicking on a website? There must be an unsubscribe button.
Sold at my doorstep? Next time your sales people try to sell me something, I can cancel with them. But I could also just go to any office/branch/shop and tell whoever works there that I hereby unsubscribe.
You get the idea.
What needs to happen is a clear path working backwards from the bank charges to unsub. They're supposed to cram in enough info in the transaction line, but how many times is it a third-party with an all-zero phone number?
Even worse are "discreet" or sensitive services such as porn, that are necessarily circumspect about the transaction details.
That's why I really appreciate middlemen like PayPal. They've got a fantastic dashboard for recurring payments that puts control back in our hands (usually) and lets you simply override the vendor's autopay arrangement.
But this sounds like even harder to get, so I’ll settle for the more simple version described above in the meantime.
Companies are literally banking on long-term subscriptions for their bottom line. If a customer has made a commitment to a gym or a service for 12 months, or 3 years, or perpetuity, then that company is also putting the customer's future payments into their budget projections. Now they DEPEND ON YOU for solvency!
So you can see that a company has a right to send you to retention or make overtures before you outright stop paying them. And you see why so many things have gone to AutoPay where the company extracts cash from your account, rather than waiting on you to write them a check, and doing the dance of late notices, late fees, collection agencies. They simply can't be a creditor to deadbeat customers anymore.
So it behooves us to think long-and-hard before that free trial, or committing to a subscription we probably won't use or want soon. To think about the future difficulty of canceling rather than the cool perks we get today. To think about passing this info on to our loved ones or PoA who'll need to deal with it at some point.
Because it's not merely about the consumer. It's about businesses being able to plan for their own future, and being able to pay their own employees, and keep their lights on. They depend on those subscriptions from us, because they represent loyalty and commitment.
A subscription that only continues to exist because the unsubscribe process is harder than it needs to be can never represent loyality and commitment, as both require an act of free will.
An initial commitment and consent leads to interdependence and cooperation. Loyalty and trust must be earned, but provided that they are earned, they shouldn't be flouted in a capricious act. Why are you canceling? You found a cheaper price? A more attractive deal? Service was bad or not worth your money? Most everyone would agree that many commitments entail responsibilities as well. Do you accept responsibility, and liability, as a customer?
If a company sends you to retention or comes up with special offers to keep you as a customer, that is not necessarily malicious behavior: they're demonstrating that they value your business, especially your money and future payments, and they're showing you what it's worth to keep that loyalty and commitment, and that's their act of free will, yes?
The company would say that the retention process is still subject to free will, but they've got policies, you signed on to those policies, so let's follow the policies. Your free-will act is to decline those come-ons; it's your free will to refuse to run the gauntlet, but hey, caveat emptor?
Can I one-click unsubscribe from my landlady? One-click close a bank or brokerage account? One-click renounce citizenship? Will California legislate 1-click Divorce Equality? Why not?
B: There is no reason to move this discussion from subscriptions to online services to some totally different topic like citizenship.
I don't know the magnitude of the expatriate phenomenon for US citizens. But it would seem that, if a country (e.g. Sudan, Cuba, Vietnam) encounters an atmosphere for people to flee and leave and renounce their citizenship, as refugees, asylum seekers, or immigrant workers, then that nation is losing their #1 most valuable resource. Does not your country depend on its citizens for wealth, peace, labor, and a future? By analogy, only by weak analogy, does a company depend upon subscribers for the same sorts of things.
I'm just saying that if the bonds of marriage no longer mean much at all, and we're all tenants renting our homes, rather than lifelong spouses or landowners, then the value of loyalty and commitment is already diminished, so who cares if I cancel my Cable TV?
Um, why though? If you bought it at the doorstep, you'll need to wait for 12 months before we come to your doorstep, whats this about "branches and shops"? You said "the same way" didn't you? ;)
Californian voters should just accept that an unregulated market is the only way to get any innovation at all.
ASML is threatening to leave not without reason.
with tinderbox-dry humor
enjoy the whooshes
I usually wouldn't on HN, but that joke was just right there.
Might be quicker to name the tech giants that aren't in silicon valley
It says, "A prominently located direct link or button which may be located within either a customer account or profile, or within either device or user settings."
I think where the interpretation that one-click sub == one-click unsub is from this passage:
"The ability to cancel or terminate an automatic renewal or continuous service pursuant to subdivision (c) or (d) shall be available to the consumer in the same medium that the consumer used in the transaction that resulted in the activation of the automatic renewal or continuous service, or the same medium in which the consumer is accustomed to interacting with the business, including, but not limited to, in person, by telephone, by mail, or by email."
The idea being that one-click is a medium, which doesn't seem to be the intent here.
We should be targeting this law at the credit cards, not the companies: The credit cards should list all subscriptions in a single place on your credit card bill, and the credit cards should handle unsubscribe in a common, and consistent way.
From the geography that gave you GDPR when will we have mandatory one-click unsubscribe, with clear cut explanations of will happen, additional costs if existing, and when the contract ends.
Who's still making that argument? The invisiblle hand died at least 30 years ago. So the endgame is simply monopolization (especially since the FTC has been getting gutted for a decade now, and is being gutted in real time). And monopolization removes choice.
WOuld be it awesome if we could all band together and protest against any site that makes subscription cancellation hard? Yes. But it's not very realistic.
The people who complain about government intervention are like children complaining about their bedtimes: Unreasonable.
> I thought the market will do what customers want?
I personally NEVER subscribe to anything unless I heavily use it. It's specifically because I fear that I'll have to jump through hoops to unsubscribe.
To qualify that statement, if it doesn’t improve shareholder value, it doesn’t matter. And the worst CEOs will take the short term gain for their personal gain over what’s better for the company and thus customers long term.
To be fair, that's usually thanks to government interventions and regulations, not thanks to free market staying free.
Markets fail for very known, very well described reasons. When they do, they rarely recover on their own, and the abusive rent seekers only become more entrenched with time (again, in the absence of regulations to curb that).
In this startup community we see a lot of "disruption" (free-market-success) stories, but in the broader world, things don't usually work out that way, and when they do, it's often just to replace one rent seeker with another.
This is a totem. Nobody who believes in capitalism thinks anarchy yields efficiency. (Just like nobody advocating against it does so in favour of totalitarianism.) Instead, you've got two groups of people not shouting at each other, but shouting among each other about how stupid a stylised representation of the other tribe's beliefs are. To the degree the groups communicate, it's in embracing the other's exxagerated representations as shows of conformity to their own groups.
All of this is unnecessary to mention, however, because you can easily find people arguing, all the time, that the invisible hand naturally prioritizes the desires of customers. This is such a default position that I’m pretty sure I was actually taught that in school (Mississippi to be fair).
That's the point, though. You didn't. Not because what was said is true. (It's not.) But because nobody honestly preaches it--certainly not here.
Arguing about the specifics of regulation is hard. Simpler to devolve to tribal identification, pretending somebody is seriously arguing for a rules-free or greed-free utopia when nobody is. It's just folks pretending others are.