Posted elsewhere in this thread but here is the reasoning why from Melissa Holyoak, who voted no. This rule goes further than just the cancellation mentioned in this article and there are some legitimate concerns with that. It is unclear but I think Melissa Holyoak would have voted yes if it was just the cancellation rule.
This is why you shouldn't let ChatGPT do your thinking for you. Skimming is an important art.
Her basic points are:
1. The FTC doesn't have the authority to make this rule, and in government there must be a hard line between "I want this" and "this is legal" unless you want a dictatorship.
2. The reason the FTC has so many Congressionally-enacted laws to follow is because of a history of overstepping its legal authority. The more they push the boundary, the less authority the FTC will have in the long-run.
3. The rule is too broad. Broad regulation is bad because it leaves too much legal wiggle-room for violators with deep pockets and smart lawyers. At the same time, small businesses who may be acting legitimately can't know they'll be accused of violating overly broad rules, or afford to defend themselves if they draw government scrutiny.
4. The FTC has a specific procedure it needs to follow for making a rule but they didn't follow that procedure.
5. Because of the above, the rule will be challenged by BigCo and struck down in court, wasting time and harming the FTC's reputation.
I'm hopeful about a "Click to Cancel" future (who wouldn't be?) but it's pretty hard to dismiss those points as "typical pro-business grift".
If someone were just attempting to maintain a "pro-business grift", wouldn't this be exactly the argument they'd make? That the FTC is, effectively, legally toothless?
I mean, making rules that will end up getting over turned in courts, setting a precedent is also exactly how you end up making institutions toothless (see, the recent supreme court decision that overturned Chevron). I'm totally for this type of regulation though, it's just that I don't think that their argument is bad at all.
I think this is just the form that "typical pro-business grift" takes these days. "This [entity] has no legal authority to do [obviously good thing]" is a favorite justification for obstructionists in power at every level of government to ensure nothing gets done. They seem to conveniently drop this position when the action in question is pro-business.
Mental models are tricky. Some people believe there is a right to pull a fast one on others or make their life hard in the name of revenue or business.
As coldpie said:
> Remember this when you're going to vote. Elections matter.
Tbh I don't think it's _even_ anti-business; if people were more comfortable with subscriptions, which this should achieve, they would be more willing to enter into them. It's anti-bad-business, granted, but you'd probably expect it to if anything increase commerce in the long run.
> this is the actual faithful steelman argument for the people who vote against this.
My argument is different. There should not be any regulation except where existentially necessary (e.g. you need government to manage an army, because otherwise someone else will conquer the country, this sort of thing).
Sure, most rules sound good in isolation. But in aggregate you end up with huge administration and 50% marginal tax rate and massive regulatory burden to businesses. Not able to cancel a subscription easily after you willingly enter into a relationship with some business is too tiny an issue to merit expanding the government monster.
> Not able to cancel a subscription easily after you willingly enter into a relationship with some business is too tiny an issue to merit expanding the government monster.
So in your world, I have to protect my credit card details from all evil people in the world forever (and also somehow prevent them from acquiring companies that I've previously given my details to), because it's okay for a company to keep charging my credit card forever, even if I don't want or use the service.
This is pretty much an argument for legalizing theft.
In my world, you generate a single purpose card number for each subscription, or block the company at the bank level. My world is all about personal responsibility.
You would presumably notify the company about the cancellation, wouldn't you. Unprofessional not to do so. However the ability of a company to not accept cancellation sent by, say, email, is not possible without the government acting to enforce such restrictions.
The US is the closest, but not close and it is getting further away. The lawless parts of the world you mention do not take care of the existentially necessary bits.
> do not take care of the existentially necessary bits.
That can't be true... people exist there. Turns out your heuristic is no more defensible than anyone else's: I want the government to provide precisely the services I want.
Sure, that is how it was designed. The reason it doesn't work that way anymore is because of a continuous parade of states violating Americans' rights, each one so egregious that people said "yeah, it was designed the way macinjosh describes, but boy it turns out a lot of these state 'cultures' or 'identities' are producing despicable outcomes for our fellow Americans, and we should step up to prevent those abuses."
I'm downvoting this comment chain because you're just throwing low effort critiques without addressing any of the big points. 1) why is tens of millions of people in a state enforcing the will of the majority on the others fine but hundreds of millions of people in the country enforcing the will of the majority on others "not caring about the consent of the governed" and "the reason democracies fail"? 2) why is it okay that people should have to vote on whether others can prey on them, exploit and abuse them? How is this one of the things you think is really important to speak out about?
In the context of this concrete discussion, allowing customers to cancel contracts they don't want - that's something which you object to because you want companies to be allowed to keep taking your money against your will, because consent matters to you? That is obviously self-inconsistent.
>why is tens of millions of people in a state enforcing the will of the majority on the others fine but hundreds of millions of people in the country enforcing the will of the majority on others "not caring about the consent of the governed" and "the reason democracies fail"?-
Because we aren't a unitary democracy, we are a federal republic that was built upon the idea of a limited federal government designed to address pressing national issues, with "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The will of the people state should almost always be superior to the will of the federal government. There needs to be an exceedingly pressing and relevant reason that any law, let alone one made by unelected bureaucrats, should overrule any of a state's laws. There is no exceedingly pressing reason the federal government should be involving itself in the process of canceling an auto renewing contract.
>"why is it okay that people should have to vote on whether others can prey on them, exploit and abuse them"
A company making it slightly annoying to leave an agreement with them is not being preyed on, exploited, or abused. That kind of language to describe "sitting on the phone longer than I want to cancel my paper subscription" or similar is bordering on histrionic.
>There needs to be an exceedingly pressing and relevant reason that any law, let alone one made by unelected bureaucrats, should overrule any of a state's laws.
Are you saying this because you believe it, or because the Constitution says so?
I think rote but beneficial consumer protections in the digital age is something that fits well at a national level. We don't need a 50-state laboratory on how to handle SiriusXM.
Oh, and making it artificially difficult for laypeople to get out of subscription contracts is absolutely predatory.
> "A company making it slightly annoying to leave an agreement with them is not being preyed on, exploited, or abused. That kind of language to describe "sitting on the phone longer than I want to cancel my paper subscription" or similar is bordering on histrionic."
This is replying to an objection about forests by saying "how could one object to a single leaf?". This other comment by someone else describes it well: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=41875283
Company behaviour is sociopathic psychological manipulation. Having to legally force companies to let you leave - if that was a personal relationship that you couldn't leave without the government forcing your partner to let you out of it, it would be an abusive one.
In that case, why have a state government? Why not have everything determined county-by-county?
In fact, why have it be county rule? Why not just neighborhood by neighborhood?
You place the locus of control according to the problems you need to solve. Neighborhoods combine to cities combine to counties combine to states combine to countries in order to be competitive and thrive against the broader environment. Yes, it does typically entail a loss of autonomy, but the benefit is that your little independent enclave doesn't get taken over by the next-strongest neighbor.
Why vote at all? You don't care about the consent of the governed, we should just make you chairman of the federal government and have your enlightened rule bring us to a new era of prosperity!
Imagine attacking a law about making subscription cancellations easier by saying it degrades culture.
Really, of all the places to get worked up about the 10th amendment, a clear-cut, low-risk, low-intrusion expansion of consumer protection is a weird one.
