> Raising prices is the ultimate consumer-hostile action. That's where you have to start. It's unavoidable when you legislate higher churn.
Some customers will now be paying 0, which is incredibly consumer-friendly for them. I'm also not immediately seeing a direct link between churn and prices. Eg if 5% of users unsubscribe but are replaced by new subscribers, I'm not seeing how the price needs to go up.
I do see how losing subscribers who weren't using the service requires raising the price, but that's largely a distortion of the market anyways. The service was offered at an unsustainable price, propped up by users paying who didn't actually want to.
> Allowing competitors to price in an easier unsubscription flow is superior to legislating it across the board, for the minority of users who care about that more than a lower overall price. Heck, some companies go even further and offer this thing called a "money-back guarantee", or will just prorate you if you ask nicely. But again you usually pay extra for these niceties, because agreeableness can and should be a valued good in the world.
That's just information asymmetry, which is again a market distortion. Users are generally unaware of how hard it is to cancel when they sign up, which unscrupulous businesses use to offer their product at below-market rates propped up by people who don't actually want to be subscribed. I would buy into this theory if they were slapping banners up that said "you must come to a physical location during extremely inconvenient hours and bicker with a rep for 45 minutes to unsubscribe". They do not, because people would avoid their service (for good reason).
> That's not a good reason to inflict harm upon the majority of satisfied users of those things by causing their prices to go up using legislation, though.
The ratio is much closer than you're letting on. Netflix's latest numbers say a full quarter of subscribers don't actually use the service. I'm struggling to see how subscribers are harmed by having to pay for the cost of providing the service, and especially not how it's preferable to prop these services up with subscribers that don't want to use it.
It also just generally encourages a cancerous business strategy of making things that consumers don't really want, and the business knows they don't want, but being able to coast off the subscriptions people don't bother to cancel. It's bad for the market. Those dollars could be going to innovative products that people actually do want if they weren't being soaked up by useless subscriptions. It also creates subscription fatigue, making it difficult for legitimate businesses to convince people to subscribe. I almost flat out refuse to do subscriptions these days, even if it's something I think I would use.