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There are some built in problems when it comes to this sort of regulator-esque legislation. If a company doesn't want to "do X," but is being forced to, the sp

There are some built in problems when it comes to this sort of regulator-esque legislation. If a company doesn't want to "do X," but is being forced to, the specific, legalistically deconstructed definition of 'X' gets very important. On the path between the kind of grand moral statements politicians trade in to the way corporate lawyers use language... a lot gets lost A common 'X' is "inform customers of something": pharmaceutical side effects, the real interest rate on a loan, etc. This often leads to a cat and mouse game, where companies "inform" customers by way of 10,000 word small print documents they know no one reads. Then the regulator tries to stop it, saying this information must be part of all advertising. Then we get verbal small print. Etc. This is why regulators exist, to play this cat and mouse game. GDPR, cookie laws, and a lot of the laws which effectively govern business have these issues. Our legislative/political system just doesn't deal with this well. On one hand we have politics, that hates detail. On the other hand, a legal bureaucracy that hates principle. It also doesn't care for economics and isn't too worried about creating environments devoid of real competition, which is an unwanted side effect of getting "regulatory." In any case, the real underlying problem here, IMO, is that 3rd parties should not have this kind of control in their hands in the first place. HNers will probably reach for blockchains and smart contracts, but this could be build into credit cards or any payment method. It doesn't really matter. Just put the ability to turn payments on/off in customer's hands. Send the service a notice. Done. We've built up all these "convenient" ways for customers to authorize repeat payment, without building in an off button. Now they're regulating the use of them instead They should have an off button. That's it.

claudius 8y ago
Alternatively, don’t force the company to accept/deny specific forms of communication; simply make it clear that any communication is sufficient to cancel a contract. There’s no point for a company to build a convoluted website if any customer knows they can send an email to info@example.com or a direct message or a text "I cancel my contract with you, my account number is 1234." and the only claim the company could make to counter that is that it didn’t receive the e-mail/message. Not that it’s internal processes didn’t allow for the message to be received, but that its infrastructure never actually received it (in which case the user would have received an email bounce message). To be nice, request the company to acknowledge receipt of the notification and, if not received, repeat on multiple channels (including certified snail mail). Oh, and make it illegal to hide surprising bits in terms and conditions due to the information asymmetry typically accompanying those :)
- dalbasal 8y ago
  This is probably the type of suggection a regulatory "hawk" would make. Essentially, make your next cat-and-mouse move big. "Lets see you get around that one, industry.!" They see how easy/optimized subscriptions are, and how hard/optimized cancellations are. They see the regulatory cat-and-mouse game. Conclude that "industry" is acting in bad faith, and suggest an FU rule like that. Industry will respond (correctly) that this kind of a proposal puts a big burden on them, and makes managing subscriptions very hard and expensive. I think it's a bad idea for the same reason you can't stop hyperinflation by yelling at retailers to stop their "greedy price gouging." Swimming directly into a persistant economic incentives current is hard. "Complying" becomes implementing the minimum standard which is still legal. A better approach (IMO, I am not a policy maker) would be to (1) recognize the major economic incentives (2) avoid leaving low level decision making (implementation) in the hands of those whose economic incentives are opposed to your goals. (3) if you absolutely must force companies to act against their own interest, be extremely prescriptive. Leave nothing open ended and do as little of this as possible. In this case, I don't think it's that hard. Regulate payment providers, particularly CCs. They already have a regulator, so no structural changes (or even legislation, possibly) is necessary. (1) Make subscriptions an explicit type of thing. (2) Enforce a minimum amount of information that the payment provider must receive, in order to honour the subscription. (3) display this information to customers. Monthly paper statements are fine. (4) Enforce a standard whereby consumers can cancel recurring payments by contacting the payment provider. A credit card service, bank, bitcoin wallet or whatever has no incentive to make cancelations clunky. Simply putting the onus on them is probably sufficient regulation. The better ones will probably give you a nice app/web view with extra user friendly features the regulator never even thought of. For example, they might alert you when "introductory price" periods end or keep track of "minimum durations" to let you know when your contract expires. A have a similar view on cookie laws & parts of GDPR. Instead of leaving everything up to websites (who have an incentive to make you give up all your rights), regulate the data browsers & ISPs share with a website. They're not as vested in minimizing user rights.
amelius 8y ago
Yes, they should play more cat-and-mouse at the government, before releasing anything to the public.

claudius 8y ago

Alternatively, don’t force the company to accept/deny specific forms of communication; simply make it clear that any communication is sufficient to cancel a contract. There’s no point for a company to build a convoluted website if any customer knows they can send an email to info@example.com or a direct message or a text "I cancel my contract with you, my account number is 1234." and the only claim the company could make to counter that is that it didn’t receive the e-mail/message. Not that it’s internal processes didn’t allow for the message to be received, but that its infrastructure never actually received it (in which case the user would have received an email bounce message). To be nice, request the company to acknowledge receipt of the notification and, if not received, repeat on multiple channels (including certified snail mail). Oh, and make it illegal to hide surprising bits in terms and conditions due to the information asymmetry typically accompanying those :)

dalbasal 8y ago
This is probably the type of suggection a regulatory "hawk" would make. Essentially, make your next cat-and-mouse move big. "Lets see you get around that one, industry.!" They see how easy/optimized subscriptions are, and how hard/optimized cancellations are. They see the regulatory cat-and-mouse game. Conclude that "industry" is acting in bad faith, and suggest an FU rule like that. Industry will respond (correctly) that this kind of a proposal puts a big burden on them, and makes managing subscriptions very hard and expensive. I think it's a bad idea for the same reason you can't stop hyperinflation by yelling at retailers to stop their "greedy price gouging." Swimming directly into a persistant economic incentives current is hard. "Complying" becomes implementing the minimum standard which is still legal. A better approach (IMO, I am not a policy maker) would be to (1) recognize the major economic incentives (2) avoid leaving low level decision making (implementation) in the hands of those whose economic incentives are opposed to your goals. (3) if you absolutely must force companies to act against their own interest, be extremely prescriptive. Leave nothing open ended and do as little of this as possible. In this case, I don't think it's that hard. Regulate payment providers, particularly CCs. They already have a regulator, so no structural changes (or even legislation, possibly) is necessary. (1) Make subscriptions an explicit type of thing. (2) Enforce a minimum amount of information that the payment provider must receive, in order to honour the subscription. (3) display this information to customers. Monthly paper statements are fine. (4) Enforce a standard whereby consumers can cancel recurring payments by contacting the payment provider. A credit card service, bank, bitcoin wallet or whatever has no incentive to make cancelations clunky. Simply putting the onus on them is probably sufficient regulation. The better ones will probably give you a nice app/web view with extra user friendly features the regulator never even thought of. For example, they might alert you when "introductory price" periods end or keep track of "minimum durations" to let you know when your contract expires. A have a similar view on cookie laws & parts of GDPR. Instead of leaving everything up to websites (who have an incentive to make you give up all your rights), regulate the data browsers & ISPs share with a website. They're not as vested in minimizing user rights.

amelius 8y ago

Yes, they should play more cat-and-mouse at the government, before releasing anything to the public.