New laws to make it easier to cancel subscriptions and get refunds | Hacker News Reader

New laws to make it easier to cancel subscriptions and get refunds

bbc.co.uk

158 pointschrisjj66 comments

I always thought the law should be really simple. It should take an average person (independent from the case and a large enough sample) about the same time to pay for something than to refund/return/cancel it. That's it.

I gladly am in Germany and companies are more scared of implementing dark patterns here for canceling products. When I was in the US I dreaded cancelling services because I knew they would make me jump around several hoops and even sometimes require contacting customer support.

Hah! Try exiting the church in Germany then. ;-)

But besides that it's really okay.

Or the GEZ... :-)

You can't unsubscribe from this because it is not a normal service, but a racket. By definition: a service that creates its own demand.

Had to pay 35€ to exit and had to make an appointment before 12pm...

See! 12 o'clock! MADNESS!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

> The church tax is only paid by members of the respective church, although the concept of "membership" is far from clear, and it may be asked what right the secular state has to tell the faithful what contribution they should make to their own denomination. People who are not members of a church tax-collecting denomination do not have to pay it. Members of a religious community may formally cease to be considered members by making a declaration to state (not religious) authorities, ending liability to pay church taxes. Some religious communities refuse religious marriages and funerals to members who leave.

Is it harder than implied to make that declaration?

I think he's alluding the excommunication aspect.

> Is it harder than implied to make that declaration?

It involves going in person to a court or to a notary public. Pretty high friction which, I believe, is largely intentional.

For 8% off my tax bill, that feels like a small obstacle.

Yes, but you'll usually have to make an appointment for that and especially in larger cities or communities this might take quite a time. So, yeah, 8% on the hand, waiting for weeks for an appointment on the other hand...

There's more friction than needed...

Good luck finding out how to contact customer support. The darkest dark pattern of them all.

> I always thought the law should be really simple. It should take an average person (independent from the case and a large enough sample) about the same time to pay for something than to refund/return/cancel it. That's it.

Can't be too hard. It's already there for email subs - US CAN-SPAM Act and UK PECR.

The US was sooo close! This was exactly how the proposed Click-to-Cancel rule worked from the Biden FTC under Lina Khan. The Trump administration came in and killed it before it went into effect, though, because of course they did (technically: they stopped a mandatory impact study and let the judiciary kill it, same same).

Shouldnt such bureaucratic bomb defusals be easier thanks to llms?

It seems to me like it ought to be possible for the consumer to cancel a payment arrangement via their card provider.

Yet my banking app (here in Singapore) doesn't let me block any prior authorizations. It feels like the payment networks don't want to make it too easy to cancel periodic payments? Which isn't surprising, of course, but it feels like something I'd change banks for.

For a while now I’ve been thinking that the solution to this kind of stuff is a sort of consumer version of the SLAPP technique.

People need to start coordinating online the simultaneous action against particular corporate entities in whatever legal venues are available to them such as small claims court.

As I understand it you often win by default if the other side no-shows. It’s a little hard and cost prohibitive for an entity to send a representative to every courtroom if thousands of people coordinate to seek legal redress against unscrupulous behaviour at the same time.

This was something Louis Rossman suggested at one point. Small claims courts don't typically allow lawyers and require a direct representative. And small claims courts are fairly cheap financially and judicially to file in.

I wager such an attack would be very costly since they'd likely be ordered to pay the court cost of around $100 per case if they left it to default. But if they didn't, they now need to take an employee from somewhere to represent them instead of doing their actual job, which is also costly. So getting even 100 people to do this simultaneously could cost upwards of $10,000 to the target company.

Idk if you have something like this in Singapore but I use an app called 'privacy' that let's me make vendor specific digital cards, and I can pause them, set limits, etc.

Nope, unlike in the US, there's no easy way to create virtual credit cards freely in Singapore (afaik). Might be a result of Singapore law, monopoly power of the banks, or just a lack of awareness that such a thing is possible.

My honest take is: in an ideal world it should become possible to unsubscribe through our bank.

This also would prevent any dirty trick from companies trying to obfuscate unsubscribing.

You can in Europe, e.g: https://wise.com/help/articles/1CoZht05rHDEJcycXU2RMh/what-a...

I don't think that's standardized, it probably only has some heuristic to detect a subscription's associated payments and rejects them. It will not integrate in any way with merchants to cancel the subscription on their side, and in fact they suggest to first trying to cancel the subscription on the merchant side.

Not quite.

"If you'd like to block a merchant and their recurring payments — please go directly to the merchant and ask them to stop recurring charges to your Wise card.

If you can't reach the merchant, or they haven't cancelled your subscription after you've asked, you can block future recurring charges to your Wise card through your Wise account."

This needs to be augmented with a new bit of contract law which enables a new type of 'subscription' where the terms are set by law.

Those terms would include things like "payments are monthly, service automatically ends when payments end, etc."

As things stand today, plenty of consumers end subscriptions by blocking payment, which practically works, but opens the doors to a scumbag company bulk chasing all those unpaid subscriptions through the courts and getting leins on millions of homes for $150 each and templated court cases.

We can already through PayPal, making it easy to unsub. But, guess what, service providers don't like that. Equally they'd not like a bank's solution.

However the payment card companies could handle this by facilitating subscriber to generate a new virtual card for each sub, then to cancel sub, cancel card. They'd need to qualify the current T&Cs which pass a charge through regardless.

This is possible in Australia via the new PayTo system. But it’s quite new, doesn’t work for international payments and so far not much uses it.

In the UK you already can for anything done via "Direct Debit", which covers a lot of regular payments.

Is "not paying" effectively the same thing as unsubscribing?

I guess they could keep providing you the service and keep track of the debt you "owe" them. Once it becomes high enough they would find ways to claim the money.

Indeed. I tried once with a particularly shady company that required phone calls to unsubscribe. The service after 1 month unpaid, but the money was still owed and ultimately they sold the "debt" to one of those companies that will try to scare you into paying via threatening emails.

I’ve been doing a lot cancellations recently and almost 80% of the services a completely scammy on unsubscription, from simply making it complicated to making a call that takes 30 minutes to cancel. It’s a travesty, and it’s one of those things they should just get penalized and to pay fees under current consumer rights now in addition to clarifying the regulation. It’s clearly hostile, intentional and acts like a scam. There are enough components for consumer rights bodies to act on in many countries

The thing is, it's so incredibly easy to make legislation that completely solves this. You just make a law that says "it must be as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for that service". Handles basically all edge cases, doesn't create misaligned incentives, and is very easily enforceable.

The previous administration was trying with its own click-to-cancel rules. Naturally, that initiative was killed last year.

I'm worried that this regulation is overreaching and will kill innovation in dark patterns. Yet another example of how Europe trails behind the US by allowing their busybody lawmakers to get in the way of progress. If you can't trick your subscribers into being unable to unsubscribe any more, how will companies survive?

Poor trillionaires, what shall they do? I guess buy a more modest yacht, that’s what. Pure cruelty!

Listen, they're the ones holding our society up. Without the money trickling down to us from all the chefs and cleaners they employ, we'd have to scavenge in the wilderness for voles.

We really should think twice before messing with the lifeblood of our economy.

I can't tell if this is satire. Some people really believe stuff like this.

And why shouldn't we? Do you know how bad your life would be without Mark Bezos? Where would you derive meaning from, if not the quarterly Amazon earnings call?

Humans are inherently amoral; we need a higher power to give us morality, and the mission statement of Meta is where we should all get our spiritual guidance from.

My life is just fine without Mark Bezos, thanks. Never heard of him. Is he some relation of Elon Zuckerberg?

Brother to Jeff Gates?

It's all about creating a chain of value. Why should the chefs and cleaners have to expend energy hunting for their own voles?

Far better to allow predators to take them to the cleaners.

(/s for if the idiom doesn't translate to your local language!)

Mister President Reagan, it's past your gravetime already.

If we don't innovate in dark patterns, China will.

boy you almost got me, ha. I need to get off the internet

Good luck unsubscribing from the Internet. Our dependency on it is the final boss of dark patterns.

An old web surfer paddles past a pair of young social media users. “Morning youngsters! How's the internet today?”

The two users look at each other, puzzled for a few moments. Eventually one leans towards the other's ear and whispers “What the heck is the internet?”

I just wish Apple would let devs cancel and refund subscriptions for people.

People get really peeved when we tell them that, believe it or not, we can't do it on our end.

Same here. Google lets you refunds or partial refunds and still don’t disclose any customer details. All you see is transaction IDs. I never understood why Apple doesn’t show a history of all IAPs in a similar way with similar control.

I set up a new throwaway virtual card on Revolut every time I sign up for a free trial or rolling subscription. After that card is used to verify payment method or to pay an initial subscription fee, I just freeze or delete the card. Freezing works well because you see the failed transactions coming through later, and it's a good reminder to delete the app if you're no longer using it.

I use a similar service from a different provider. Having a different card for different merchants is useful in general.

But doesn't Revolut charge you anyway for the "legitimate" post-cancel transactions? NatWest, Barclays etc. do.

No, because the Revolut card used on the offending service has already been frozen or cancelled by me at that stage.

Well, traditional card companies aren't so generous, so I'd be wary.

The virtual card trick is underrated as a consumer solution. Create a new card per subscription, delete it when you want to cancel. No dark patterns can survive that. The problem is it puts the burden on consumers to be technically sophisticated, which most aren't. And the average person shouldn't need a fintech workaround to cancel a gym membership.

Exactly. Virtual cards are a clever workaround, but the fact that people need a workaround at all is the problem. A consumer protection issue should not depend on whether someone knows the fintech hacks. The baseline should be simple: if it’s easy to sign up, it should be just as easy to cancel. Laws should be aimed at removing the burden from consumers, not rewarding the small slice of people who are technical enough to route around dark patterns.

In the US, the problem with this as a solution if you had some contract or agreement with the company, simply not paying doesn’t mean you have cancelled that contract. They could continue to bill you, report non-payment to credit bureaus and try to come after you via collections.

Many/most won’t do all that but it is something to keep in mind.

Same here in UK.

Don't wanna bite but... Shouldn't this also cover the tv license in the UK?

It probably will, along with mobile phone contracts and other such things.

Crapita already do remind you ahead of time that they're going to start collecting the money for next year's TV license if you already have one, and there's no such thing as a "free trial just enter your card details", you either buy a TV license or you don't.

Of course, as is their modus operandi, if you were to cancel your TV licence, they'd immediately start bombarding you with URGENT WARNING: YOU NEED A TV LICENCE TO WATCH TV AND YOU CAN GO TO PRISON IF YOU WATCH TV WITHOUT ONE after precisely 6 months.

They do that even if you inform them the TV license holder has died, and remains dead 6 months later, and 12 months later yup still dead and nobody watching TV, 18 months, uhuh, let me check, oh sorry yes mum is still dead, guess she doesn't need the TV license, 24 months yup yup pushing up daisies Crapita, don't think you're going to get a TV license out of her...

The humans you talk to are apologetic, but the whole operation is to continually mailshot every address in the country that doesn't have a license in the hopes they buy one. I love the BBC and pay my own license, but someone please round up the entirety of Capita and fire them all into the sun.

Seconded.

How Crapita continue to get government contracts despite all their failings is simply beyond me.

Their latest cockup is fucking up civil service pension administration, so it's not like those who work for the government are except from their screwups.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/27/capita_pension_portal...

Is the TV licence a subscription? I see it closer to a tax for using a public service or good, like the road or council tax.

I consider it a subscription because it is collected directly by the BBC and spent by the BBC.

Taxes, on the other hand, are collected by the government.

It falls between the two.

It is, effectively, a subscription. But it is partnered with statute law which makes it an offence to receive TV broadcast signals without paying this subscription (and now also an offence to watch iPlayer, etc.)... which is unlike most subscriptions.

It's similar to how other governments fund their national broadcaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#Television_...

It's seen as strictly better than the government providing funding from general taxation, which would mean directly controlling the state broadcaster and its purse-strings.

And generally speaking, there are very good reasons to fund your country's own film/TV industry, rather than rely on other countries supplying the funding and the media (and the opinions and the cultural sway and the power and the control).

While the BBC is in charge of collecting it, and it is largely (but not exclusively) spent on the BBC, the TV licence is imposed by and paid into the government's funds. The government then "grants" the money back to the BBC.

> The revenue and associated expenditure [...] are those flows of funds which are handled on behalf of the Consolidated Fund and where the BBC acts as agent rather than as principal

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/ss/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&b...

The Office for National Statistics also classifies it as a tax: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldselect/ldbb...

it should be one or two clicks, like the unsubscribe link that is required in a mailing list email

Meh

In Blighty, the worst case scenario simply involves sending a snail mail letter to the company secretary (address from Companies House) saying "I cancel".

When sending it, don't forget to collect your(free) proof of posting certificate from the post office counter just in case of legal shenanigans.

Job jobbed.

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