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From the article >"While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the

• marricks 1y ago
  It’s a pro business anti consumer supreme court which knows it’d be dangerous to appear that way. Government and court will hamstring their ability to help consumers. My favorite comment on HN was some law student saying his prof said “Scalia is the most complicated supreme court member whose views are always unpredictable” and the commenter said “he’s just a corporate hack who always votes for corporations and backs it up” and sure enough he guessed every ruling correctly.
  • pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    > they rightly commented that if this was allowed to stand, the FTC and every government agency would just always estimate low in these cases. I think you missed this — it isn’t some arbitrary reason to rule in an anti-consumer way. There is good reason to do so. Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong, and this is one small action that does that.
    • antonvs 1y ago
      > Imo we should keep our checks and balances strong I think the tense of this sentence is not quite right. Something more like "Make checks and balances strong again" would work.
      • pinkmuffinere 1y ago
        Haha, ya I agree with that too
    • bagels 1y ago
      There are always reasons on both sides of a case
    • mring33621 1y ago
      so, small questionable wins for normal people would break the system while big, veeeeerrrrry questionable wins for some subset of the elite are OK?
    • AlexCornila 1y ago
      sure bud .. wake the fck up
  • skeeter2020 1y ago
    >> It’s a pro business anti consumer supreme court Maybe? But this wasn't the supreme court: "...was vacated by the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit."
    • js2 1y ago
      The 8th Circuit has an even more conservative composition than SCOTUS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals_for_the_Eighth_Circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Court_of_Appeals... Case was decided by Loken (GHW Bush), Erickson (Trump), and Kobes (Trump).
      • Yeul 1y ago
        In my country politicians do not appoint judges. The separation of the branches of power and all that... But I will say that having independent justices who constantly fuck up your government plans can be exhausting.
• Glyptodon 1y ago
  $100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US. But it also seems ridiculous to skip since four people doing nothing but having a discussion about a new rule for 30 minutes across a good portion of those businesses is easily $100mil w/o them even having to lift a pinky besides.
  • slg 1y ago
    >$100 million or more rule seems silly when that's the cost of ~10 stoplights and there are like 33 million businesses in the US. A minute of internet research suggests that specific $100m figure is from a 45-year-old law[1]. I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. That equivalent value today is almost $400m. EDIT: Actually the number might come from a 29-year-old amendment[2]. It is disappointing how hard it is to track these things down. [1] - https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/rulemaking/flexibility-act.html https://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/regulatory/rulemaking/flexibil... [2] - https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/942 https://www.congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/senate-bill/942
    • ct0 1y ago
      Seems that the hard coded fixed dollar amount argument can apply everywhere, see small claims court maximums.
      • arwhatever 1y ago
        Not to mention > $10K financial transaction disclosures
    • jMyles 1y ago
      > I don't know why every government law and regulation that references specific monetary values like this aren't pegged to inflation. It's an utter mess. This job falls primarily to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who compiles the basket of goods that make up the Consumer Price Index - but this doesn't include food or fuel, for example. The Bureau of Economic Analysis also maintains several indices which are used as inflation proxies when it's convenient (and which are most often used by the various working groups within the federal reserve system to, eg, determine interest rates). But these are somewhat more volatile and more subject to fluctuations due to international political affairs, etc. The most obvious metric - the literal inflation in the money supply - is also tricky because the process by which money is created is so baroque. The ability to have more coherent laws which reference amounts of money is a good reason to adopt sounder and more transparent practices in monetary policy.
• gmd63 1y ago
  I don't buy that argument. The issue is companies deliberately built complexity on top of their existing systems to make it harder to cancel. The added complexity that costs a lot of money to fix is a result of their unfair and deceptive practices. An enormous amount of deadweight loss would be returned to the economy if they simply implemented a much simpler design of click to cancel and avoided the unfair and deceptive practices in the first place.
  • sebzim4500 1y ago
    Isn't the argument that making it easier to cancel subscriptions means that more customers will cancel and the cumulative effect across the industry will be much more than $100M?
    • jakeydus 1y ago
      No, I think that the $100M number comes from the cost of implementing the change, not the impact to the impacted companies' bottom line.
      • cortesoft 1y ago
        I think the other person is right… the term is “economic impact” not “cost to implement”
        • jakeydus 1y ago
          That's what I thought too, but from the ruling in the article, it seemed like the justification came from calculating the cost to implement (emphasis on 'compliance costs'. > But an administrative law judge later found that the rule's impact surpassed the threshold, observing that compliance costs would exceed $100 million "unless each business used fewer than twenty-three hours of professional services at the lowest end of the spectrum of estimated hourly rates," the 8th Circuit ruling said.
          • CWuestefeld 1y ago
• eddd-ddde 1y ago
  Of course anything that benefits the consumer will affect business revenue. That's the whole point!
• Buttons840 1y ago
  While the courts, supposedly, focus on what the law actually says, remember that Wickard v Filburn (1942) established that growing a plant on your own property for your own personal use is "interstate commerce". I don't know a lot about law, but I at least know that ruling on what the "actual law is" is selective, and usually selective in a way that is beneficial for the rich and powerful.
  • chairmansteve 1y ago
    And corporations are people...
    • parineum 1y ago
      Do you not think that corporations are composed of people who have rights?
      • gopher_space 1y ago
        Is a corporation without any employees still a person?
        • parineum 1y ago
          It never is a person. The Citizens United ruling determined that the people in the corporation have the right to free (political) speech, regardless of the coalition they are part of. Everyone pretty much agrees with this, The Democratic party liked to push the meme you're repeating because it helped them beat Romney. They intentionally misinterpreted his and the court's words to win an election and people have been repeating the lie ever since. The answer to your question is no, a corporation without people isn't a person and neither is a corporation with people. The "people" in the phrase "corporations are people" are the ones with rights. The singular if the phrase is "a corporation is people" not "a corporation is a person", as you were misled into thinking.
          • gopher_space 1y ago
• tshaddox 1y ago
  > As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what sounds good. There is reasonable room for disagreement about "what they're always supposed to do." Legal pragmatism is a prominent theory in American law.
  • Supermancho 1y ago
    This ruling regarding the FTC requirement states the court's understanding of the purpose and import. I think it's also important to acknowledge the very practical outcome of bypassing it. Future legislation will understate the impact of changes citing precedent.
• irrational 1y ago
  From what we’ve seen recently, the federal government and federal agencies are no longer following the law, not even the constitution. I’m not sure what makes this case unique.
  • trelane 1y ago
    "No longer?!"
• eli 1y ago
  > As with a lot of judge rulings, and what they're always supposed to do, they ruled on what the actual law is and not just on what sounds good. A "lot" of judicial rulings do indeed follow that pattern. But there have been mulitple high-profile & high-stakes examples recently of just the opposite. To the point where I thought you were making a joke at first.
• didibus 1y ago
  What's dumb is that no one cares about the 100 million+ that customers lost in paying for extra months of subscriptions they didn't use. I feel there should be counteracting rule, like, if customers impact is X$$ than it doesn't matter what the business loss is, or maybe whichever is higher win, I don't know.
  • db48x 1y ago
    You might be misunderstanding the purpose of the hundred million dollar rule. It is an arbitrary threshold, that’s true; any threshold would be. But what it triggers is just an extra step that the FTC must go through where they receive suggestions from the public, including the industry to be regulated, for _alternatives_ to the proposed rules. They must then go through and determine for each of the alternatives whether it would be effective at achieving the goal of the new regulation, and if so whether it would be cheaper to implement than the proposed rules. If it would be both effective and cheaper to implement, then the FTC is supposed to drop their own proposed rules and adopt the alternative rules instead. So for example if the proposed rules said that everyone selling any kind of subscription must do X, Y, and Z, and Z was pretty expensive, then you might write in and suggest doing W instead of Z. If W would be effective and cheaper to implement than Z, then the FTC is supposed to change their proposed rules to require everyone to do X, Y, and W instead. There's just not much reason for this step to depend on how much fraud the new rules would prevent. The public comment period and the analysis steps only take a few months, and in the grand scheme of things a few months is not much time at all.
    • didibus 1y ago
      A few months added to all the subscriptions people are paying for and not using could easily surpass 100+ million in lost customer money. I'd still venture it makes sense to have a counter party looking at the financial harm to the public, and not just the companies.
• grafmax 1y ago
  Simply because a court followed the letter of the law doesn’t make its decision just. Unjust societies from time immemorial have utilized courts to legitimize all sorts of rotten things. Claiming that the court is right to throw consumers under the bus based on a technicality misses the fact that the primary function of the legal system in our society is serving the capitalist class. In fact what we see here is not some impartial determination but the court fulfilling its structural purpose by betraying consumers for business profits.
• pedalpete 1y ago
  If this $100 million in impact rule is the reason for the judgement, wouldn't that suggest that a scam that takes in more than $100 million would be protected? That's essentially what these businesses are doing. They're taking money from people who either don't want their product, or didn't realize that they'd be charged continuously. Just yesterday I cancelled a service, they made it very simple, until I read the very small print that said "this service is paused for 1 month". I didn't want a pause, I wanted a cancel, but how many people are being caught out by this. I emailed them, and the CEO replied that they are changing this policy. I'll try to follow up on that in a month, but I'm not believing this on face value.
  • tzs 1y ago
    > If this $100 million in impact rule is the reason for the judgement, wouldn't that suggest that a scam that takes in more than $100 million would be protected? No. The $100 million rule doesn't say that things with more than $100 million in impact cannot be regulated. It just says that more analysis is required when regulating such things.
    • db48x 1y ago
      Note especially that the hundred million dollar rule is about the amount of impact _of the new rules_, not the impact of the fraud that they’re trying to deter. The extra steps that they must go through are all about finding alternative rules that would be cheaper to implement, using suggestions from the public and the regulated industry.
• GolfPopper 1y ago
  The actual rule can be found here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/24/2023-07035/negative-option-rule https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/04/24/2023-07... "the Commission must issue a preliminary regulatory analysis for a proceeding to amend a rule if the Commission: (1) estimates that the amendment will have an annual effect on the national economy of $100 million or more; (2) estimates that the amendment will cause a substantial change in the cost or price of certain categories of goods or services; or (3) otherwise determines that the amendment will have a significant effect upon covered entities or upon consumers." The claim that this will have an "annual economic effect of $100 million or more" seems to fail a simple BS test. Corporations change their cancellation terms to be more honest, which is a one time change, and then keep them there. There is no "we have to work to stop defrauding people again this year" cost, they just obey the law and don't need to spend anything more. (It's not like they weren't maintaining "how to cancel" services in the first place. If anything, this lowers their overhead, but simplifying the byzantine cancellation process.) The only prolonged impact will be to dishonest corporations bottom lines, not the "national economy". All that's happening here is a court saying "too big and too crooked to fail" and finding an excuse.