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Comment by janalsncm | Hacker News Reader

To add some color to the regulatory issue as I understand it, the court ruled that the impact of this rule would be over $100M so they’re required to assess cost/benefits of alternatives and submit them during the public comment period.

I don’t even know what the alternative would be apart from doing nothing. Making it more of a pain for consumers to cancel is zero sum on first order analysis (if I lose a dollar because I can’t cancel the company gets a dollar) but at a second order makes our economy less dynamic by entrenching incumbent companies and making it harder for consumers to allocate their money towards better alternatives.

If a company can trap your money in a labyrinth of process they don’t have to compete on quality or price. Simple as that.

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I’m always amazed how willing the courts are to block actions like this on vague technicalities but are then so deferent to police violations of civil liberties where even a violation can still upholds the original judgement against that person and only applies going forward.

The process is broken. If there was an issue with no alternatives being specified, the right time to bring that up was during the public comment period when there weren’t any alternatives. Not after, imo.

I get that process needs to be followed but this is allowing unnecessary gamesmanship.

It was brought up, by the FTC members who voted against it, precisely because it didn’t follow the process. But the democrats had the majority so it passed anyway. And then was immediately sued for failing to follow the process.

You never hear about the millions of perfectly reasonable rulings every year.

The stuff based on vague technicalities that result in something you agree with isn’t memorable, so it’s the vague technicalities you disagree with that’s memorable.

The unreasonable ones seem to be growing at an unusually high rate since January.

Is this based on any sort of statistics, or is it just another media narrative?

This is not a vague technicality, though? The FTC has to obey the law, and the law says that if they make a new rule that has more than $100M of direct monetary impact, they have to use a more involved process. They originally tried to waive this by saying that the rule doesn't have more than $100M impact, but that's just clearly false.

It's not a good thing to cheer rules being broken when you like the reason.

Do lawmakers want a dynamic economy? I guess that would make it harder to keep track of whose “lobbying” checks have cleared.

Orthogonal issue, imo. They can accept bribes from new companies or old ones.

I don't see how it isn't blatant judicial corruption that big business gets special legal considerations because they might not earn as much money.

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