While this may be a trivial issue, being able to cancel a gym or newspaper subscription, it sends a signal. Companies need to view customers as partners in a business transaction and not objects to be exploited.
I am sympathetic to a perspective that says this is not the responsibility of a mayor of a single city... But also; who else is going to do it?
Normal people have very little say over the politicians that govern them in larger electoral regions like states or provinces, and maybe this can signal to other levels of government that they should implement similar rules... If it works.
If there's anybody from the mayor's office reading this, how about that all banks must provide their services at minimum on a browser through a web app and cannot mandate the use of a smartphone.
With a population of 8.5 million if NYC was a state it would be the 13th largest so I'm quite all right with the city going beyond the normal purview of a city government.
Do you mean good government? Or well-functioning? Any government that is formed legally is legitimate.
Government should represents and advocate for the best interests of the entire population. It should legislate for both people and companies to behave fairly towards each other.
Consider the gym membership. You join and sign a one year contract. The terms are that you can cancel after that period, but if the gym hides or dark-patterns the cancel procedure, are they really offering you the contractually agreed upon ability to cancel? They are not.
We all know what fair is. Just because companies (and sometimes individual people) have outsized power against their customers, it does not give them the moral right to abuse that power.
So, I believe in this case Mamdani is engaging in both good and well-functioning governance. And that to me is morally legitimate.
Some British media / reddit 'users' did the same over-the-top congratulatory puffery for some laws passed in the UK.
Like hello, Parliamentary supremacy and a whopping majority, the Lords who will at most suggest a few tweaks for anything that's been sold well, a Prime Minister who was a Barrister - passing laws is the easy part!
Call something the Renter's Rights Act for example and people lose their minds falling over congratulating the Government and Parliament before it even passes.
(In defence of some of our media, they did write one or two articles about all the people who got kicked out prior to the law coming into effect - just a couple of weeks before it coming into effect...)
We're software devs - we should know writing code (particularly now) is frequently the easy part. Tests, deployment, versioning, monitoring, logs, effect on revenue etc, bit trickier.
Who is deceiving who now? And I'm not sure who is in power here...