Whenever this subject comes up I'm disheartened to see how many are willing to blame the victim: the consumer. We have allowed businesses to exist whose only r

Whenever this subject comes up I'm disheartened to see how many are willing to blame the victim: the consumer. We have allowed businesses to exist whose only really business model is duping customers into a subscription and then making it difficult or impossible to cancel. Just go look at timeshares [1]. I would dearly love to give money to some quality news publications to support their work but I don't. Why? Because I absolutely don't ever want to deal with their subscriptions department should I ever want to cancel. Ever tried to cancel an Equinox gym membership? I've seen half a dozen sign up constulants standing around at the entrance, someone call up to cancel and being told there's no specialist available. Cancelling a service should be no more difficult than pressing a button on an app or a website. We passed the CAN-SPAM Act to force compliance in communications for businesses [2]. The same should apply to taking their money. Speaking of gyms, it's an anti-user business model. The perfect gym customer is one who pays for a membership and never uses it. The more members a given gym can "support", the more profitable it is. If everyone used it 2 hours a day they'd go out of business. Planet Fitness took this one step further and removed their most popular equipment to dissuade people from going and charging so little that people usually can't be bothered to cancel it. All US cable/Internet start with an introductory rate that quietly gets jacked up over time. You can go through a "cancel dance" to renew that rate every year or so but it's absolutely exhausting to have to deal with this. VPNs do the same thing. $2.99/month introductory price! Wow! Bargain! It just quietly gets jacked up later on. This is what government is for. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd2bbHoVQSM [2]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...