The FTC puts off enforcing its 'click-to-cancel' rule

I leave one star reviews for those places with the text "gas pump ads can't be muted." Hopefully others will too... one can dream anyway.

>Because without any form of regulation, the ISP has no requirement to honor that letter?

Is this your personal exerience, or are you making assumptions?

I would love to hear how this process possibly fails to unsubscribe anyone:

1. Go to your state's corporate website and get/buy the name and address of the corporate registered agent for your ISP or whatever. In Texas that costs $1.

2. Write or ask ChatGPT to write a demand letter that they cancel your service as of the date of your letter. If they don't, threaten to sue them in small claims court. In Texas, threaten triple damages under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. (ChatGPT will help you write demands using the "laundry list" of deceptive acts.)

3. Send letter return receipt requested.

4. A lawyer on their side is now involved. They will never ever show up in any small claims court for this. And if they do, the judge is so on your side for this!

Heck, this works for a bunch of things, once you assert your rights. For example, I made a Coinbase account when they first existed and played with $10 of bitcoin. There it sat for six years or so, and then I tried to log in again. Their identity bullshit was demanding to use a phone number from an older phone and they stonewalled. So I sent a demand letter as above and, surprise!, my account was magically re-enabled for my $3 of bitcoin.

Genuine question. Why country with so much freedoms tolerates this particular injustice so much.

Freedom to pay is very fundamental for free speech, I think courts and legislatures made this very very clear multiple times.

There are whole countries where you don't need Apple as intermediary to cancel any subscription without notice. In these countries it is up to companies to sue you if they think you are in wrong, and "they made it hard to cancel subscription" is basically all defence consumer ever needs.

So they never win.

So they never sue.

most credit cards allow you to create a temporary card number. Create one, set it to be the billing method, and then revoke it. crazy that we need to resort to that sort of thing, but it does work!

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for lunch.

Well, you being collective.

I'm happy to see the waste reigned in and corruption exposed.

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On this issue there is no difference between the previous admin and the current one. The FTC voted 3-0 to postpone. Even though Trump fired two of the original five, if those two had both voted against postponing they would have still lost 3-2 and the same decision would be reached — and I don't think there's much evidence that the two he fired would've voted against postponing, anyway.

This administration is making a pattern out of 1. Creating a rule or executive order to score easy political points with their base, and then 2. Immediately walking it back or “postponing” it once those points were scored and their base are not paying attention. Trolling-As-Governance.

Democrats see government differently than Republicans.

I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress". There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").

He's talking about the trump administration, not making a general point about all governments.

With any other disadvantaged/discriminated class (skin color, sexual orientation, gender, etc.), getting elected in power doesn't change the disadvantage. So the incentive is still there to fight for that equality.

This is not so when it comes to the poor. Once in power they are no longer poor so the incentive to fix any issue related to this almost entirely evaporates.

Let's follow the money. A policy that pumps stocks by dumping labor + consumer rights delivers a roughly equal cost to everyone but delivers benefits in proportion to net worth. Suppose it pumps assets by 1%.

A $200k NW individual gets 2x cost and $2k gain.

A $3M NW individual gets 2x cost and $30k gain.

A $6B NW individual gets 1x cost and $60M gain.

A $400B NW individual gets 1x cost and $4B gain.

If it wasn't obvious, these numbers correspond to the Median American, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. People whining about focus on ownership and complaining that all politicians are bad are drawing this equivalence across 3-6 orders of magnitude of incentive to do evil.

In contrast, I argue that incentives matter and that high NW individuals in politics have uniquely misaligned incentives. The focus on ownership doesn't just matter, it matters more than it ever did before.

owner class: people who choose to pursue positions of power to benefit themselves financially while cosplaying as wanting to help the average person

There now it’s both. They want to own agency if the idea of owning stuff is too gauche for modern audiences.

Just because they weren’t born into the owner class (or “capital class”) doesn’t mean they didn’t work their way into it. That’s kind of the American dream.

Laws get pushed off for all kinds of reasons.

It seems like this was pushed off to give businesses more time to comply.

Many kinds of businesses have subscriptions, each with a different situation. Some small businesses don't even have a programmer.

Requiring a phone call is not always (although often is) to make it difficult to cancel. Often it's because a company doesn't have the proper infrastructure for the frontend.

So I think it's reasonable that they are giving companies some time.

In the end, I hope that on July 14th this goes through, it will be a big win for consumers.

EDIT: My answer didn't fully address the question, so let me add: I don't think is the result of Trump trying to be friends with billionaires for their money. I understand why it seems that way - because he literally does that. But this doesn't seem special or extraordinary. Enforcement of laws gets pushed off all the time.

And there's no longer a CFPB to help you when it happens...

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Visa and MasterCard suffer from charge backs already, and don't seem to mind. They try to avoid it with AI in the fraud department, and they push some of the cost onto the merchants.

They could do so much more. We still don't even have chip and pin in the US. They seem to think that the current levels of fraud loss are cheaper than the business lost from stopping it.

Number of people afraid to pickup the phone and talk to another human being instead of letting few hundred in forgotten subscription is larger than I previously thought. By that sense, without any data, I suspect that chargeback amount is wayyyy smaller headache compared to txn fees from forgotten uncancelled subscriptions.

That would definitely be a huge perk to me!

I really don't want unelected corporations with no accountability to anything other than profit margins to be policing payments, subscriptions, business behaviour, or anything else.

These companies provide an utility that is essential for participation in the economy. There needs to be some due process if you want to exclude people or corporations from that.

Even better would be a little field showing the rate and due date:

    [Cancel] [USD 12.99/mo billed on the 20th]

Fair enough.

I'm going off my experience with cookie banners, and how that whole thing seemed like a great idea at the time but turned out to mostly be an incredible annoyance.

In the same way, I don't think I'd enjoy a cancel button being front-and-center and cluttering up an interface at all times, given that I don't want to perform a cancellation action the vast, vast majority of the time when I am using a subscription service.

95% of the services I use already stick a cancellation button in either a "billing" section or a "user" section, which is generally quite easy to find and use in the rare instances I need it.

If this suggested policy isn't based on consumer need, what is it based on?

I think realistically three clicks would be fine.

Click to settings Click to cancel Click to confirm cancel

Usually signing up takes more effort than that! I didn't even have to type anything.

This is the danger of data-driven decision making.

You can only gather a very, very small subset of all data. So now you're basing your decisions off of a tiny picture, so you end up with sometimes strange conclusions. Conclusions that, intuitively, make no sense. But the data says so, so I guess that's what we do.

Believing that "reputation" actually matters for American businesses is laughable.

Craftsman tools are STILL riding the reputation they had half a century ago, despite being made out of the cheapest chinesium and losing their impressive warranty stance.

The American consumer has demonstrated an absurd inability to consider past events as useful information to predict future results.

Things continue to enshittify because the 3 consumers who recognize that quality is going down are vastly outweighed by the increase in consumption by the rest of your market.

Kitchenaid still sells plenty of mixers that die after a year. Hell, American car brands are still successful businesses even though they have made only a few reasonably competitive vehicles since the 50s.

Disney and Netflix are still making plenty of money despite making it difficult to share accounts.

I’m my own villain

I’ve only been to the US as a visitor, and found the percentages varied between shops and goods. I’m sure there is a pattern, but it really does seem crazy that it isn’t shown on the price tag.