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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

Regulations like this are written in consultation with the industries being regulated. There is a ton of wrangling and nailing down details. It's usually hundreds of pages long and specific to the industry.

So they can't just write a single thing that rights all wrongs. And their staffing is extremely limited.

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>they can't just write a single thing that writes all wrongs.

Found the attorney! Nobody asked for "a single thing that writes all wrongs."

Simple, broad laws can absolutely be written, they are especially easy to write, and they are usually the best laws for decent average citizens, but decent average citizens are not who laws are written for in the United States. Most people already know this.

Isn’t it kind of helpful to have an attorney’s opinion on law?

Anyways, it’s very easy to complain there isn’t a law which eliminates whatever fees you think are ridiculous across a large swathe of industries. What specific implementation would you suggest, though? I’ve not heard of these apparently simple approaches.

> What specific implementation would you suggest, though? I’ve not heard of these apparently simple approaches.

Good question! Thank you for asking, I will do my best to help provide the answer:

One common implementation is to require that all marketing show the final price most prominently, which seems reasonable to me.

"But wait," some may interject, "That final price may vary depending on jurisdiction!"

Yes, that is true, and entirely possible to deal with, and requiring advertisers to account for that is a better solution than requiring all customers to deal with the alternative. Besides, nobody is forcing the company to vary the price. They can just charge a flat price that accounts for the average of all local fees, and/or eat the fees, which was the intent of the legislation in the first place.

Thanks for answering! So you’re saying the solution is basically more clarity? I think I could agree with that. Probably effects similar to when we added calorie counts to menus here in America.

I don't exactly want a law that eliminates the fees, just that displayed prices are the "out the door" price that can be broken down however you like internally.

Without it it's much more work to comparison shop because you have to actually try and purchase from everyone to see the real price.

> Simple, broad laws can absolutely be written,

This isn’t a law. It’s a regulatory policy.

Simple, broad laws have another term that you can often use to describe them: “sweeping”.

Those kinds of changes are better left to legislators, who are responsive to political pressure and subject to elections.

I’m all for regulatory rulemaking by executives, but it should generally be careful narrow rulemaking. Simple, broad, sweeping changes should generally be left to the legislature.

> I’m all for regulatory rulemaking by executives, but it should generally be careful narrow rulemaking. Simple, broad, sweeping changes should generally be left to the legislature.

I would agree, if not for the empirical evidence showing us that legislators rarely make the changes that the people want. If they're not going to do it, somebody else has to.

Narrower changes would be nice, but they require a correspondingly short feedback loop of decide-act-adjust, which does not currently exist for legislators or most government administrators. If one desires narrower changes, I encourage them to first ensure the government moves and responds to customer (citizen) needs, faster than it currently does.

Either way, government structure and action should be what meets the needs of the people.

Broad laws and regulations have obvious problems that should be evident to anyone who works with code for a living. There’s a reason lawyers are cautious and precise.

The UK requires that all advertised prices include all extras and charges a typical customer will pay.

Ie. If you charge £100 for a hotel room, but have a £5 fee for using the lights, you have to advertise it as £105 because nearly every customer will be needing the lights.

Super simple rule. Works really well.

I'm in the US, so you'll have to forgive my ignorance, here, but isn't the UK's tax law pretty tightly unified at the federal level? I once got into an argument with the county (Travis, Texas) over how to account for a penny difference in the calculation of sales tax. The resulting form involved (like) 6 govt entities and 7 pages of calculations.

EDIT: if I'd been in Burnet, it'd be almost completely different forms & calculations.

In that case, you could charge a flat rate of 110, to account for the variability and your work dealing with it.

In this case, it isn't "writing a single things that rights all wrongs"

Its "Write something that helps consumers know what they'll be paying"

It wouldn't even be changing the billing at all, but changing how they advertise pricing. Fees such as the example would need to be included in advertised total price of your bill. You wouldn't even need to change the bills. The companies have enough staff to do this in advertising. Government agencies' staffing would be stretched with or without such a rule.

I live in the UK and the policy on fees is effective and runs about a hundred pages. What you are describing is regulatory capture.

> hundreds of pages long and specific to the industry

Very convenient how it works out

For my behaviour the law is very short and clear - taking product or service without paying for it is theft.

If I pay for 1 car but take an additional wheel, I am a criminal.

But management of a company can wake up one day, take more money from my account and call it an additional fee for the same service.

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