US 'click to cancel' rule blocked by appeals court | Hacker News Reader

US 'click to cancel' rule blocked by appeals court

reuters.com

37 pointspetethomas14 comments

>”failed to conduct a preliminary analysis of the costs and benefits of the rule”

Let me get this straight. The rule is declared void because the FTC failed to consider the cost to business to correct unfair and predatory business practices. Courts to consumers: Heads we win, tails you lose.

They get to create rules despite being unelected. The catch is they have to follow the procedure for rule making in the law that grants them this power. Even if the rule is a very good idea.

I understand the justification being used. But it's bogus. These corporations are engaging in theft from the general public, using deceptive business practices that organized crime would be proud of. The claim made by the complainants is that stopping them from robbing consumers would cost them more than $100M, which, if you include their ill-gotten gains, is probably true. IOW, "it would cost us too much to stop robbing people, therefore we shouldn't be forced to stop." The FTC rule was not ending a good-faith business practice. And the job of the courts is not sanctioning theft. Those are the main objections here.

As for the "despite being unelected" dig, let's apply this standard fairly. The courts are also unelected, as are the businesses involved.

I highly recommend using temporary cards for each online vendor you deal with.

I personally use Capital One Eno, a free service offered by one of my cards. This allows me to easily deactivate temporary cards without having to deal with the hassle of contacting customer service for companies, like Adobe, that make cancellations difficult. Additionally, I use private burner emails to register for the service and simply register again later if I want to use it at a later time.

Can’t this lead to pretty bad credit checks? Absolutely not defending the practice at all, but companies that charge an annual subscription paid monthly (like the leeches at Adobe) are generally allowed to report the cancellation as a delinquent account IIRC.

Yes, this only solves for them not being able to continue charging you, they would still be within their rights to continue to accrue debt in your name and report it to the credit agencies in this case, utterly ruining your credit and ultimately inundating you with calls from bill collectors.

That's when you dispute the debt in writing and all that good stuff.

Except, if you're in a bad position to dispute the credit card charge, you're probably in a bad position to dispute the debt as well. If whatever you signed up for had ironclad renewal clauses you'd find it very hard to wriggle out of it, temporary credit card or not.

Well you can always send a dispute letter and then it's on the charging company to prove to the card issuer that the charge is legitimate I think. Now this probably won't get you out of a renewal charge if you signed a contract and did absolutely nothing to cancel, but if you have evidence you sent an email or contacted them, then you have some sort of case the card issuer has to look at. Especially if you can show you didn't use the product after they charged you.

If anything they can't argue that you want the service on the next renewal date.

I do know sometimes you are stuck. I had a friend sign up for home security monitoring on a 3 year contract - and Ring was better, so they wanted to cancel it, but they were unable to get out of it.

Thanks for bringing this up. I wasn’t aware this could happen, but it hasn’t happened to me yet. I’m a bit afraid to continue doing this now.

Might as well use gift cards at that point, since I think you’re probably leaking metadata to whoever provides the temp card service.

  > failed to conduct a preliminary analysis of the costs and benefits of the rule

so, not blocked on the merits per se but on procedure...

I miss Lina Khan.

Yes, and I miss the rule of law and less corruption too.

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