The FTC puts off enforcing its 'click-to-cancel' rule

Is this your personal exerience, or are you making assumptions?

I would love to hear how this process possibly fails to unsubscribe anyone:

1. Go to your state's corporate website and get/buy the name and address of the corporate registered agent for your ISP or whatever. In Texas that costs $1.

2. Write or ask ChatGPT to write a demand letter that they cancel your service as of the date of your letter. If they don't, threaten to sue them in small claims court. In Texas, threaten triple damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. (ChatGPT will help you write demands using the "laundry list" of deceptive acts.)

3. Send letter return receipt requested.

4. A lawyer on their side is now involved. They will never ever show up in any small claims court for this. And if they do, the judge is so on your side for this!

Heck, this works for a bunch of things, once you assert your rights. For example, I made a Coinbase account when they first existed and played with $10 of bitcoin. There it sat for six years or so, and then I tried to log in again. Their identity bullshit was demanding to use a phone number from an older phone and they stonewalled. So I sent a demand letter as above and, surprise!, my account was magically re-enabled for my $3 of bitcoin.

Freedom to pay is very fundamental for free speech, I think courts and legislatures made this very very clear multiple times.

There are whole countries where you don't need Apple as intermediary to cancel any subscription without notice. In these countries it is up to companies to sue you if they think you are in wrong, and "they made it hard to cancel subscription" is basically all defence consumer ever needs.

So they never win.

So they never sue.

This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.

A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.

A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.

A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.

A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.

If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.

In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.

There now it’s both. They want to own agency if the idea of owning stuff is too gauche for modern audiences.

It seems like this was pushed off to give businesses more time to comply.

Many kinds of businesses have subscriptions, each with a different situation. Some small businesses don't even have a programmer.

Requiring a phone call is not always (although often is) to make it difficult to cancel. Often it's because a company doesn't have the proper infrastructure for the frontend.

So I think it's reasonable that they are giving companies some time.

In the end, I hope that on July 14th this goes through, it will be a big win for consumers.

EDIT: My answer didn't fully address the question, so let me add: I don't think is the result of Trump trying to be friends with billionaires for their money. I understand why it seems that way - because he literally does that. But this doesn't seem special or extraordinary. Enforcement of laws gets pushed off all the time.

They could do so much more. We still don't even have chip and pin in the US. They seem to think that the current levels of fraud loss are cheaper than the business lost from stopping it.

These companies provide an utility that is essential for participation in the economy. There needs to be some due process if you want to exclude people or corporations from that.

    [Cancel] [USD 12.99/mo billed on the 20th]

I'm going off my experience with cookie banners, and how that whole thing seemed like a great idea at the time but turned out to mostly be an incredible annoyance.

In the same way, I don't think I'd enjoy a cancel button being front-and-center and cluttering up an interface at all times, given that I don't want to perform a cancellation action the vast, vast majority of the time when I am using a subscription service.

95% of the services I use already stick a cancellation button in either a "billing" section or a "user" section, which is generally quite easy to find and use in the rare instances I need it.

Click to settings Click to cancel Click to confirm cancel

Usually signing up takes more effort than that! I didn't even have to type anything.

1. Login

2. Go to your account page.

3. That should have a link to billing management.

4. Somewhere on the billing management screen there should be some easy to figure out way to cancel.

Details will vary but in general cancelling logically makes the most sense as part of payment management, so it belongs where other payment management goes such as adding or updating a credit card.

If the site wants to it would be fine to have a separate subscription management section that is linked to on the account page parallel to billing management. That might make sense if it is a service where there are options users can add to or remove from subscriptions.

For example a streaming service might have separate paid options such as higher video resolution, more simultaneous streams allowed, removing ads, and adding specialized content (e.g., porn, foreign language videos).

That wouldn't really belong under billing so putting it in a separate subscription management section would be better, and then cancelling would best fit there too. Billing management would then just be managing your payment methods.

You can only gather a very, very small subset of all data. So now you're basing your decisions off of a tiny picture, so you end up with sometimes strange conclusions. Conclusions that, intuitively, make no sense. But the data says so, so I guess that's what we do.

Craftsman tools are STILL riding the reputation they had half a century ago, despite being made out of the cheapest chinesium and losing their impressive warranty stance.

The American consumer has demonstrated an absurd inability to consider past events as useful information to predict future results.

Things continue to enshittify because the 3 consumers who recognize that quality is going down are vastly outweighed by the increase in consumption by the rest of your market.

Kitchenaid still sells plenty of mixers that die after a year. Hell, American car brands are still successful businesses even though they have made only a few reasonably competitive vehicles since the 50s.

Disney and Netflix are still making plenty of money despite making it difficult to share accounts.