Why do we need to regulate all this, I thought the market will do what customers want?
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.