This only serves to allow firms to erect effort barriers to keep rent seeking fro their customers. The "gotcha" that the Khan FTC didn't "follow the rules making process" is parallel construction.
The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.
HN guidelines ask that you say "The article mentions that".[0]
A shoddy implementation would just mean later problems. Hopefully the FTC gets the memo and does it "the right way" to make it watertight, otherwise people will just get away with doing whatever they want.
The reason they have to do studies is so they can't rush things through. We don't want them to be able to rush things through. They're creating law.
I'm hardly going to do that research myself, so I have no opinion. There are legal bloggers whose opinions I'd respect. I assume comments on Hacker News are no more informed than my own, unless they show they have relevant expertise.
What's more interesting to me is the court is basically admitting that doing the right thing for customers will cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let this go ahead.
This is quite correct. The FTC estimated that there are 106,000 businesses offering subscriptions to Americans. Those are the ones that would have to comply with the new rules.
A hundred million dollars is a lot of money, but divided by a hundred thousand businesses it suddenly is only $1000 each. Not actually that much! Since the new rules proposed by the FTC include a lot more than just a button on a website, complying with the rules would in fact require every one of these companies to do a fair amount of work. They’ll have to review all of their existing marketing material, and all of the forms that they use to sign up customers. They must ensure that all material facts are disclosed to every prospective customer, and that consent is obtained from the customer correctly.
Certainly these are good rules for businesses to follow, but the question now is the cost. Can your business review all of its marketing material for less than $1000? I doubt it. So the judge rightfully noted that the FTC’s estimate of the impact was insufficient.
And all they have to do as a result is to allow additional public comment on the proposed rules, with the specific intent to find alternatives. If these alternative rules would be just as effective but cheaper to comply with then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternatives. They had already done some of this in the earlier phases of the process, and the result was that several unworkable rules were indeed dropped. They could have spent a few more months doing the final review and analysis, but they decided to rush it through instead.
> What's more interesting to me is the court is basically admitting that doing the right thing for customers will cost unscrupulous businesses more than $100M they're currently fleecing those customers for, so they won't let this go ahead.
I’ll say it again that this has nothing to do with how much the unscrupulous are getting away with, or whether it would cost the unscrupulous businesses anything at all. This is entirely about the cost to the legitimate businesses.
If they are worried about this… either mandate some third party do the estimate, or mandate the study. This is just confusing.
() - of course I haven’t read the actual law or ruling yet…
The FTC didn’t make that rule.
Who do you think created that rule that anything that lost money for advertisers? I’ll give you one guess
The fact that you’re indignant that someone doesn’t agree with the argument is absolutely absurd.
The law/rule constraint was corrupt from the outset in order to provide multiple avenues for capital to ensure they don’t lose their profits.
Believe me, I'm incredibly disappointed that this didn't work. I paid a Planet Fitness membership for a year after I had moved to a place too far away from any PF location to reasonably use it, just because the cancellation process was so convoluted that it took me ages to figure out how to cancel. I think that companies should be held liable when they employ predatory business practices like this. I agree with your premise, that the limit is too low and there's nothing to stop companies from lying about the cost to implement the rule. But the law is the law is the law is the law. Courts exist to interpret the law, and in this case, the law they were asked to interpret was whether the FTC had abided by the $100M cap. They found reasonable justification to rule that they had not.
Again, I get the desire to be up in arms over this. But recent events have shown just how fragile our legal system is when people decide that the rules can just be ignored, and I wish that people would be more hesitant to throw the baby out with the bathwater, even when doing so would mean I wouldn't have to pay planet fitness $20/mo for a year.
And you'd find such sentiments to be completely worthless, except insofar as they act as cover for a ruling on a technicality in favor of the same corporate interests that fund the politicians that appointed these judges.
It really seems like a weird line in the sand that the court will just randomly decide on a case by case now, with the FTC having no way to know if the court will agree with their estimate or not.
Now, the rule is good. There is no reason why the current FTC shouldn't implement it. It literally harms nobody except for businesses addicted to dark patterns.
Well:
> The FTC issued the proposal in March 2023 and voted 3-2 to approve the rule in October 2024, with Republican Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew Ferguson voting against it. Ferguson is now chairman of the FTC, which has consisted only of Republicans since Trump fired the two Democrats who remained after Khan's departure.
This is just an obvious lie.
They're not supposed to, but they obviously do. Usually against common citizens' interest.
Anatole France
I don't think people feel well served by knowing that bad laws will last forever. The civil service was supposed to be a non-partisan way to manage the country efficiently. It does not do me any good to say "No, you are stuck with the inefficient system, and you should feel good about that because at least it's written down."
Either way this ruling was bought and paid for.
I do not hold the democrats in my heart but claiming they're "both equally bad" is absolutely ludicrous.
[0] https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024
[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.
Intuitively it feels like their wealth would eclipse Elon Musk.
The regulator said it didn't reach $100 million, so there was no need. The court said bs, this would cost at least that much
We hand out these get-out-of-trouble cards to the type of useless trash that destroy lives (see pollution, workplace safety, dangerous products knowingly misadvertised as healthy, etc), let those disgusting shareholders profit, and then use tax dollars to cover the bill (if anyone does). Now you wan them to have rights on top of the special treatment? How about instead we do something that is sane, something that doesn't make a handful of people extremely powerful, and doesn't make millions of sad, pathetic tools who just want to pretend they matter complicit? How about we say, "Look if you want special protection, you have to follow these rules that limit the damage you do. If you want to do those damaging actions, you can be responsible", and put in a bunch of rules that stop these specially protected investors from profiting off other's suffering.
tl;dr - it's an incredibly stupid and ultimately harmful position that a paper granting special privileges has rights. Corporations are no more entitled to profit than anyone else, privileges should come with responsiblities equal to them.
this is Bad, Actually
It doesn't seem that farfetched to me to imagine two sites offering equivalent services, one at $5/month and the other at $6/month, with the only difference being the $6/month site offers click to cancel. This dollar price difference is often the difference between the life and death of a company.
A harsher way of phrasing it would be this serves the consumer who actually pays attention to their bills. I've had a cheap gym membership sitting around for a few months that I haven't gone to. I don't want to go to the effort of cancelling it, because that's hard. My sloth subsidizes the gym goers who actually do use the service every day and pay less than they otherwise would for the privilege. Poor, lazy, stupid people like me should still be given the option to spend our money in poor, lazy, stupid ways.
Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.
The other issue is that if these things are guaranteed in law, they have a nasty habit of simply disappearing. A great example of that is ads in paid streaming services. In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content. They are even toying with not allowing a higher payment to opt out of ads (which will likely come).
Click to cancel would be the same way. You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option. Just like nothing has stopped companies from requiring phone calls, at the right time, in the right manor, and with a 20 step Q/A retention process. Bad enough that you can now pay people to sit through retention processes to cancel for you.
We can get pretty close. Take Adobe versus Affinity. Same industry, very similar product suites, but totally different pricing strategies, and Adobe makes cancellation much more annoying.
There are plenty of examples of this if you keep your eyes open. I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't have an exact example to give you is because I'm under NDA and I don't watch most consumer retail enough to know.
>Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it.
Tacit collusion becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain in any market with more than a handful of players. A different pricing strategy is one of the easiest ways to counterposition against an incumbent there is. It's part of how SaaS toppled bubble wrap CDs in the first place.
That can be lower pricing with the same model, or it can be a one time purchase versus a subscription, or it can be a hard to cancel but very cheap subscription over a very expensive one time purchase.
> In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content.
People are more willing to pay $10 per month with ads than $12 per month without ads. I don't find that especially shocking. The market figures out what people actually want, not what people say they want.
Say it were not so. Then we would see some Netflix renegades start a new streaming platform that is Ad Free Again™ and only a tiny bit more expensive than the competitors, and most consumers would switch. It's not impossible, but I haven't seen that happen yet.
>You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option.
If I care enough about the feature and this price differential, I'll notice this and eventually go through the aggravation of cancelling to switch to a new, slightly higher priced service which does have click to cancel. I paid more for the easy cancellation promise and when it was revoked the service became less valuable to me. Whatever, it was fun while it lasted. A monthly subscription to Netflix is not a marriage, and it is not an investment.
It's not click to cancel, but... airlines will charge extra for the right to cancel with a refund. Cheapest ticket is non-refundable, higher priced in refundable. But these are finite resources - seats, dates/times, etc. Not infinite capacity SaaS platforms.
People do it all the time, at all levels of scale and severity. You might as well take issue with the US government not having a "click to cancel" option on NATO or something.
This isn't about cancellation fees, a fixed-term commitment, or anything of the sort. It's agreeing that "you can cancel by filling out the form" without mentioning that to get the form you need to climb down into an unlit basement, and find the form in a maze of unlabeled filing cabinets while evading the guard leopard.
You're always paying a fee somewhere to hedge against cancellation risk somewhere in the system. There is no free lunch. It's either going to be in the asking price or at the tail end. You can force everyone to raise their asking price and hence price millions of people out of Netflix for every $1/month you go up, or you can let people self-select.
Options provide value to the purchaser even when they are not exercised. It is a common but grave error to model options the same way one would model a simpler pay-per-usage style service for that reason. We might as well start telling people they can't buy monthly bus passes if they don't use them every day.