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What consumer does this serve at all? What citizen does this serve at all? This only serves to allow firms to erect effort barriers to keep rent seeking fro th

• thrance 1y ago
  It serves the current administration's in-group: the ultra-wealthy.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • whamlastxmas 1y ago
    Got a surprise for you if you think any admins in group isn’t the ultra wealthy
    • XorNot 1y ago
      "this paper cut is exactly the same as sticking my arm in a wood chipper, which is why I chose the latter..."
      • John23832 1y ago
        I will use this in the future.
    • platevoltage 1y ago
      “It’s like a uniparty bruh”
      • pessimizer 1y ago
        Actually Republicans are like demons and Democrats are like angels, which is why their policies are so distinct. I am very sophisticated.
        • thrance 1y ago
          Can you seriously compare the administration building concentration camps, cutting medicare for 12 millions people (effectively killing a lot of them) and dooming America's future through insane spending to the previous administration? I do not hold the democrats in my heart but claiming they're "both equally bad" is absolutely ludicrous.
  • marcusverus 1y ago
    Why would the ultra-wealthy be this administration's in-group? Trump won voters with under 100K income, while Harris won those over 100K.[0] Among high-net-worth individuals, Harris had a 10 point lead among those with $1-5mm in net worth and a ~2 point lead with those >$5m, according to the only polling I could find that specifically targeted high-net-worth individuals.[1] It's possible that the "ultra-wealthy" buck this trend, but I haven't seen any data that suggest such a thing. [0] https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024 https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/how-groups-voted-2024 [1]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/millionaires-harris-trump-vote-poll-b2623262.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
    • TheCoelacanth 1y ago
      Trying to extrapolate the behavior of people with $100 billion from the behavior of people with $5 million is clearly nonsense. That's as big of a difference as between someone who makes $20 million per year and someone at the global extreme poverty line of $2.66 per day. Of the five richest people in the world, 80% were personally sitting right behind Trump at his inauguration.
      • sssilver 1y ago
        More like “five richest people in the US according to their tax returns”. Nobody has counted the money of the Saudi Prince, the president of Russia, and a few dozen other characters like these. Intuitively it feels like their wealth would eclipse Elon Musk.
• rayiner 1y ago
  Courts don’t make decisions on whether executive rules are told or bad, serve consumers or not. The main oversight they have is ensuring compliance with procedural rules and statutory technicalities.
  • miltonlost 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • cindyllm 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • michaelsshaw 1y ago
        I wouldn't describe any member of our current court system as "the best"
        • cindyllm 1y ago
          [dead]
      • nkrisc 1y ago
        There many ways in which the US is not “the best”. That should be obvious to any American, it’s not hard for us to see if you’re looking for it.
    • rayiner 1y ago
      The non-Federalist Society folks think that “emanations from penumbras” is constitutional law. How can right wing judges even compete with that? I think we may have drastically different understandings of what “the law” is.
      • syntheticcdo 1y ago
        Note that the court case that first invoked “emanations from penumbras” involved a Connecticut law banning the the use of contraceptives. Do you believe such a restriction should be constitutional?
• hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  The standard capitalist response would be, it serves the consumer of a service who wouldn't be willing to pay more for the additional guarantee of click-to-cancel. It doesn't seem that farfetched to me to imagine two sites offering equivalent services, one at $5/month and the other at $6/month, with the only difference being the $6/month site offers click to cancel. This dollar price difference is often the difference between the life and death of a company. A harsher way of phrasing it would be this serves the consumer who actually pays attention to their bills. I've had a cheap gym membership sitting around for a few months that I haven't gone to. I don't want to go to the effort of cancelling it, because that's hard. My sloth subsidizes the gym goers who actually do use the service every day and pay less than they otherwise would for the privilege. Poor, lazy, stupid people like me should still be given the option to spend our money in poor, lazy, stupid ways.
  • cogman10 1y ago
    The issue with this argument is that services follow industry standards. You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry. Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it. The other issue is that if these things are guaranteed in law, they have a nasty habit of simply disappearing. A great example of that is ads in paid streaming services. In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content. They are even toying with not allowing a higher payment to opt out of ads (which will likely come). Click to cancel would be the same way. You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option. Just like nothing has stopped companies from requiring phone calls, at the right time, in the right manor, and with a 20 step Q/A retention process. Bad enough that you can now pay people to sit through retention processes to cancel for you.
    • hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
      > You can't find me a single example of two competing services, one with click to cancel and the other without, in the same industry. We can get pretty close. Take Adobe versus Affinity. Same industry, very similar product suites, but totally different pricing strategies, and Adobe makes cancellation much more annoying. There are plenty of examples of this if you keep your eyes open. I'm pretty sure the only reason I don't have an exact example to give you is because I'm under NDA and I don't watch most consumer retail enough to know. >Companies pay attention to what their competitors are doing. If everyone is doing it, they'll happily go along with it. Tacit collusion becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain in any market with more than a handful of players. A different pricing strategy is one of the easiest ways to counterposition against an incumbent there is. It's part of how SaaS toppled bubble wrap CDs in the first place. That can be lower pricing with the same model, or it can be a one time purchase versus a subscription, or it can be a hard to cancel but very cheap subscription over a very expensive one time purchase. > In the beginning, you paid for the service and no ads. But then hulu came along and had ad content for the lower tier. That started a chain reaction on the other streaming platforms where now they all do ads for paid content. People are more willing to pay $10 per month with ads than $12 per month without ads. I don't find that especially shocking. The market figures out what people actually want, not what people say they want. Say it were not so. Then we would see some Netflix renegades start a new streaming platform that is Ad Free Again™ and only a tiny bit more expensive than the competitors, and most consumers would switch. It's not impossible, but I haven't seen that happen yet. >You might sign up for something with a click to cancel feature, there is absolutely nothing from stopping a company from quietly removing that option. If I care enough about the feature and this price differential, I'll notice this and eventually go through the aggravation of cancelling to switch to a new, slightly higher priced service which does have click to cancel. I paid more for the easy cancellation promise and when it was revoked the service became less valuable to me. Whatever, it was fun while it lasted. A monthly subscription to Netflix is not a marriage, and it is not an investment.
• giingyui 1y ago
  Courts don’t only serve consumers and citizens. They also have to serve corporations. This is not a flippant remark; corporations also have rights to defend.
  • sophacles 1y ago
    Who the fuck cares? Seriously - a corporation is a piece of paper that separates ownership from responsibility. It's already a fucking stupid idea - You're deeply liable if you can't keep you trees maintained, or your car under control, but if you can't control you company, it's no problem? We hand out these get-out-of-trouble cards to the type of useless trash that destroy lives (see pollution, workplace safety, dangerous products knowingly misadvertised as healthy, etc), let those disgusting shareholders profit, and then use tax dollars to cover the bill (if anyone does). Now you wan them to have rights on top of the special treatment? How about instead we do something that is sane, something that doesn't make a handful of people extremely powerful, and doesn't make millions of sad, pathetic tools who just want to pretend they matter complicit? How about we say, "Look if you want special protection, you have to follow these rules that limit the damage you do. If you want to do those damaging actions, you can be responsible", and put in a bunch of rules that stop these specially protected investors from profiting off other's suffering. tl;dr - it's an incredibly stupid and ultimately harmful position that a paper granting special privileges has rights. Corporations are no more entitled to profit than anyone else, privileges should come with responsiblities equal to them.
    • zaphar 1y ago
      Then get legislation through congress to change it. The courts are not there to fix legislation unless it is superseded by other higher legal authorities. Such as the constitution national or state. Current legislation gives them corporations rights. If you think that is wrong then the way to change it is to get people elected who can change that legislation.
      • sophacles 1y ago
        One of the key steps to get Congress to change things is to first get support from voters for the change.
• libraryatnight 1y ago
  A significant portion of this community believes in "move fast and break things," but just for businesses, when it comes to helping people - slow down!
  • Herring 1y ago
    To be fair, helping people like them is deadly to your community. That's what theyre signalling, and I think they might have a point. You can't just give people money (power) because they're poor - look at Latinos voting for Trump. Their ethics have to also be right.
• caesil 1y ago
  If you actually bother to click through and read the article, you'd find the court expressed sympathies with the intent of the rule, but the FTC "is required to conduct a preliminary regulatory analysis when a rule has an estimated annual economic effect of $100 million or more", and they did not do that. The blame here belongs to the FTC for its rushed and sloppy process that put the rule on shaky ground legally.
  • julienchastang 1y ago
    > "If you actually bother to click through and read the article," HN guidelines ask that you say "The article mentions that".[0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • mh- 1y ago
      [flagged]
      • barbazoo 1y ago
        Two wrongs don't make a right.
        • mh- 1y ago
          [flagged]
          • fkyoureadthedoc 1y ago
            > Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Sorry bro I had to
            • mh- 1y ago
              Hah, totally deserved. I honestly almost added at the end that if I could flag my own comments in this thread they'd be deserving of it, too.
• NickC25 1y ago
  This benefits the lawmaker's clients - the large corporations. Or maybe the lawmakers are the clients. Either way this ruling was bought and paid for.
• derektank 1y ago
  People are served by knowing that, regardless of what the law says, it will be applied consistently. It's on the legislature to write new law if the old law is bad, not the judiciary.
  • black6 1y ago
    In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread. Anatole France
  • jfengel 1y ago
    That would ring less hollow if there were any way for the legislature to actually write laws. Congress writes vanishingly little non-trivial legislation, because every proposal has to be viewed in terms of political benefit. I don't think people feel well served by knowing that bad laws will last forever. The civil service was supposed to be a non-partisan way to manage the country efficiently. It does not do me any good to say "No, you are stuck with the inefficient system, and you should feel good about that because at least it's written down."
  • tshaddox 1y ago
    I would prefer judges to settle disputes fairly, rather than say "I've been given the authority to settle this dispute and I'm going to settle it in a way that I think is unfair because of some alleged rules about how I'm supposed to make my decisions."
• barbazoo 1y ago
  Companies are people too! And after all they are the biggest donors so this actually serves exactly who it's supposed to.
• mbac32768 1y ago
  If there are at least 10,000 subscription services in the US and they will spend at least $10,000 to figure out if and how to comply with a click to cancel requirement (feel free to move zeros from one number to the other), the law says they must be allowed to at least have their comments heard before it's implemented. This comment opportunity was not provided. The regulator said it didn't reach $100 million, so there was no need. The court said bs, this would cost at least that much