It is the reason I use digital cards for all memberships; I make a new one for each. People said 'the company will take action for non payment' but they never did ; I did this for the past 15 years with phone companies, cable/internet, online service, and, indeed gyms; works fine. But then again we don't have that insane weirdness called credit rating/score here, so maybe it doesn't work for countries where people accept that type of idiocy?
Always use a virtual CC to pay for these types of services. You will also want to make sure you never give anyone access to direct withdrawal from your Bank Accounts. No auto payments either.
When you want to cancel, tell them you are moving to Canada and have to cancel. they stop trying to sell you on keeping the service. Settle up and cancel your Virtual CC.
That doesn't fix the issue, just tries to bypass the symptoms (and you're still on the hook, a CC isn't some magic "get out of a contract" card; even if the other party just gives up trying to collect).
I am in France and use Direct Debit everywhere. This is the most ised and useful mechanism we have.
No virtual CC or similar tricks: the companies get the money from your account and you never see the bills .
One major point which may not exist in the US is that you have a button on your bank web site which you click to suspend or delete the DD authorization. From there on the bank will refuse to pay and the discussion is between you and the company.
When I want yo cancel something it is either straightforward on their site, or I send an email requesting the account to be removed and block DD
Practical advice. But we need to address the underlying problem. I mean, if people were getting mugged 50% of the time, it would be practical to take hand combat lessons. But in that case, too, you'd want to address the underlying cause most of all.
Yeah. We need to address the problem and the problem is customer hostile practices like this that try to trap customers. This is exactly what the FTC fixes.
Interestingly, I don't think a court would look kindly on intentionally obfuscated or difficult cancellation procedures imposed on a contract unilaterally. And I don't think the cost/benefit ratio favors a firm taking someone to court on this. (Collections may be an option for them, and I'm not sure how you challenge the validity of a charge or who decides.)
Always wondered why there are no large scale protests against credit score. I wouldn't live in a country where corporations got such power. Not entirely sure why there is not more outrage about it; it doesn't benefit anyone but big corporations, so why does the average or even any citizen (rich people just probably pay their cable or gym even if they don't want to, but it's not benefitting them either?) just take it? It's a debilitating thing which china happily copied from you and 'improved' on.
A lot of things in USA benefit nobody but -big- corpos, it is kinda "by design".
In many countries, if one gym is annoying and doing weird things, you move to another one the next month. But when all the gyms are owned by the same company or two, they can go away with such behaviour.
We can see it in this article too.
I imagine that would do. I've never done it but I suspect there is a dispute process, even if it is corrupt (for example, administered by the collections agency).
> The lawsuits say the FTC order was "arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion within the meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act,"
Anyone with knowledge who can expand this or explain what exactly is "arbitrary", "capricious" or "abuse of discretion"?
As far as I can tell, the best argument the cable companies have is "a consumer may easily misunderstand the consequences of canceling and it may be imperative that they learn about better options" but that feels contrived at best. Anyone have any better arguments against the new FTC rule?
After reading about this in BIG, my understanding is that they are leaving a breadcrumb trail so this can be challenged by conservative circuit judges on process grounds. Because why bother addressing the underlying issue when you can just throw everything out on process and hold society back.
The reason to require legal cases meeting process is what helps every day people not get railroaded by zealous police and prosecutors. Arguing to weaken this requirement would have far reaching bad consequences for society.
And, if a judge does rule that this change did not follow the law, then no matter how much you like it, it's far better that legal requirements get met than to weaken them over something like this.
"Arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion" is all more-or-less boilerplate legalese that was lifted straight out of the Administrative Procedure Act.
It's a reference to a specific level of evidentiary standard that the Act prescribes. Basically, the APA is generally deferential to the agencies deciding how to implement regulations, so challengers have to demonstrate that the implementation in question represents an unreasonable abuse of power.
What it really boils down to, though, is that they're complaining that the FTC didn't make a strong enough case that the burdens this rule imposes on service providers are proportional to the consumer protection benefit.
> who can expand this or explain what exactly is "arbitrary", "capricious" or "abuse of discretion"?
If you follow SCOTUS opinions, like half of them are about these words. That isn’t an answer so much as an admission that the APA is one of the more jargon-heavy areas of law. Importantly, however: these standards are not overturned by the junking of Chevron deterrence.
Arbitrary-and-capricious focuses “on the process of decision-making rather than the outcome itself. Courts applying this standard do not substitute their judgment for that of the agency but instead examine whether the agency’s decision-making process was rational and based on consideration of relevant factors” [1]. Courts will look at if the agency “relied on factors that Congress did not intend it to consider…failed to consider an important aspect of the problem,” or “offered an explanation that runs counter to the evidence before the agency.” So if an agency doesn’t consider reasonable alternatives to its rule or doesn’t provide evidence for each step in its thinking, its rule can be struck down [2].
Note that these concepts trace from judicial standards, i.e. appellate courts will overturn lower courts if they acted arbitrarily, capriciously or abused their discretion. If a lower court “does not apply the correct law or rests its decision on a clearly erroneous finding of a material fact.…rules in an irrational manner” or “makes an error of law,” its ruling can be overturned on the basis of abuse of discretion [3]. So if an agency facing a statute of limitations gets stonewalled by a defendant running out the clock, and a court dismisses (versus stays) the case on the basis of the statute of limitations having run out, that is abuse of discretion [4].
> Can't they just make it harder to sign up, so they can make it harder to cancel?
The obviously ideal case for the cable companies is "easy to signup - borderline impossible to cancel", as that'd lead to the highest short-term profits.
My gym closed during the pandemic and sold their memberships to another gym then continued charging me. Luckily the owners of my "membership" were understanding and let me cancelled over the phone.
Most of these cases are not more related to whether the FTC (or whatever agency in question) is/should be allowed to make the rule at all. It's not really about the rule itself. Obviously the specifics of the rule will play into that, but it's not usually about the merits of the rule itself.
It's good that these cases happen. The agencies should be kept in check, they can't just make stuff up as they go. There is a reasonable position that some folks take - that the agencies were never intended to have such broad powers and have vastly overstepped their bounds.
> Additionally, the FTC has rulemaking power to address concerns regarding industry-wide practices. Rules promulgated under this authority are known as Trade Rules.
But of course, that specific sentence is labeled "citation needed" so can't really dig deeper there. But taking it at face-value, isn't that one of the points of the FTC at least today, that they can setup these "Trade Rules"?
Eh, but there will always be some level of detail that was not delegated. That's the bad faith side of Loper. It essentially says that every detail of every instance must be expressly included in the legislation. Which just isn't possible.
Loper says nothing like that! I know that there were a lot of hot takes after the decision, but read it yourself. All Loper says is that when the law is ambiguous about agency powers, the courts get final say, they don't defer to the agency interpretation.
And let's face it, that's what they're doing. As much as I hate the cable companies, this weird governance structure where most of the legislation in the country is written by these extra-constitutional agencies is super sketchy. The government is not supposed to be able to make these massive changes to its own structure and separation of powers without the check of having to amend the constitution.
You’re right it’s much better for a do-nothing Congress attempt to legislate rather than let experts decide (which is also handled through a democratic process).
Much better to maintain the status quo. Wouldn’t want to upset a corpo now would we?
Imagine living in a common law country where judges legislate from the bench every day, then going online and complaining about regulatory agencies doing the thing they were created to do
This is a disingenuous argument. I too think they're engaging in law-making, but if that were their concern then they have the influence, time, and specialized knowledge to convince Congress to make it a law. You know, so everything's proper.
When the criminal says "hey, that's not fair, the legislature didn't make this thing illegal that should be illegal"... well, let's pass it as a law. Anyone not a criminal should be on board with that, including the complainants.
Make no mistake. This is fraud by any sane standard, fraud of the criminal sort. These companies should be fined tens of billions of dollars, if not more. Those who cannot afford such fines (Planet Fitness, etc), should be bankrupted, their assets sold at auction, and their executives and directors prohibited from ever holding such jobs again. Make the shareholders of these companies destitute.
Here is one, and it will come up almost certainly.
A service has all your source code. Click to cancel is super easy. Privacy laws mean that data must be destroyed almost instantly. You accidentally click and POOF all your stuff is gone. So... to avoid that the service implements something like github - now you have to enter details of the repo, maybe 2fa in because security, and so on. An overzealous Lina Khan type now comes after a service doing the right thing making it hard to shoot yourself in the foot.
every new rule has lots of cases like this. At any given point a good number of the agency heads are ambitious folks trying to build a career of note, not actually protect society.
I don't think this scenario is credible in the sense that the FTC would have to receive complaints from devs who love nuking all their code, complaining that GH made it far too difficult to wipe away all their work.
No, they wouldn't have to receive complaints. The FTC doesn't sit around waiting for complaints to take action. They also take action (sometimes) after receiving complaints, but it's not the only way.
That's not why it's disingenuous, it's very simple: This will reduce their profits. Any additional analysis is superfluous.
There is a good reason why Harris doesn't use the FTC (under Lina Kahn) to gain political capital. This is the sort of stuff that actually matters, so naturally barely anyone ever talks about it.
An argument about what mechanism of law should be used, who has jurisdiction isn't disingenuous.
A class action lawsuit could likely work. This doesn't need to be a rule per se. These companies are behaving poorly and it should cost them billions - but we don't need to create red tape every time this happens.
What is there to expose? Basically every company would probably like that, if a company doesn’t sign up, it’s not because they are too moral but because they think the public perception of them will take a hit.
> Basically every company would probably like that
No, only the ones who suck. I don't mean this in a jokey way. If I'm UpstartISP, Inc. and I believe that my product is actually better than Comcast offers, I want people to be able to cancel services without being jerked around, waiting on hold, and hassled, so that they can sign up with me.
It's only companies that know they suck, and that their whole business is full of scams and deception, that want this. Yes, that's entire major industries, such as the "home security" lobbying group and cablecos mentioned in the article. As well as gym memberships.
> No, only the ones who suck. I don't mean this in a jokey way. If I'm UpstartISP, Inc. and I believe that my product is actually better than Comcast offers, I want people to be able to cancel services without being jerked around, waiting on hold, and hassled, so that they can sign up with me.
Sooner or later, some SeniorLeader inside UpstartISP, whose bonus is driven by profit or loss, will do the math and note that making it harder to cancel will cause quarterly profits to increase by 0.N%, and then the company will surely make the change. The tendency for all companies to profit-maximize guarantees it.
I think I basically agree with you on that part. I'd propose an axiom: "All companies tend over time toward increasing levels of cynical rent-seeking behavior in place of innovation or competition."
Which is why they should be restricted from engaging in any easily-definable instances of that behavior (ideally by actual legislation instead of this silly executive branch stuff).
Banning the mature, craven companies from building moats of anticompetitive, anti-consumer behavior is a way to help the next generation of new entrants to either kill them or to force them to compete, either of which is a win for consumers and better startups trying to dethrone them.
> Sooner or later, some SeniorLeader inside UpstartISP, whose bonus is driven by profit or loss, will do the math and note that making it harder to cancel will cause quarterly profits to increase by 0.N%,
Companies need people empowered to say "that will probably increase short-term profits, and damage our reputation in the long term, so no, we're not doing it; we're in this for the long haul".
I am more likely to sign up for something I can cancel. Also, if I can trial it and it doesn't work, I can leave. If it sucks and I can't leave I am going to be horribly pissed.
A really good example is https://www.verizon.com/plans/free-trial/ I was testing between verizon and mint for my physical location. For whatever reason, VZ was underperforming, so when the trial expired, I left a happy temporary customer. I have since recommended it to others, knowing that they aren't going to get locked in.
Being able to cancel actually make more happy customers, not less. It is only the enshitified mba run companies that trap customers that exhibit the parasitic practice of trapping customers into long contracts, confusing bills and impossible to cancel w/o burning your payment account number.
I actually would sign up for the local gym that just went under in my neighborhood, but I knew I would never be able to cancel, so I skipped it.
Verizon has a different strategy for this type of thing but is still in the 'enshitified mba-run companies' category. Charge like $400 for a 5g internet device that's worth like $12 and built on OSS anyway (+ probably charge it again if the device isn't returned). Device only has only a power-button and is designed to be preconfigured, but isn't, so that they can make the customer call and navigate 6+ hours of tech support. This is so frustrating that it might easily take a month to do it if you want to keep your sanity.. which means they can bill an extra month providing no service at all, and if you were counting on a trial period it's probably over. The trial cancelation might be easy, but really, that matters most when there's actually significant competition among providers.
In the end it's service that's easily twice as expensive and half as good as what most of the civilized world enjoys.
There's what, like 10k hours in a year, half a million hours in a lifetime? So rather than "make it easy to cancel" laws what we really need is some general recognition of the fact that deliberately stealing 1 hour of time from half a million people is roughly equivalent to murdering 1 person. Everyone knows that class actions for a $2 dollar check are a joke. If your business is practically essential so that you're basically guaranteed customers, and your business practices deliberately add friction that cost people time+money, then you're guilty of violence as well as theft.
Biggest problem with the corporate personhood stuff is how a corporation can’t be convicted of crimes and put in prison. Which encourages behavior that has that type of effect. Even if it were considered like a murder there’s no one to prosecute. Companies would behave differently if flagrant abuse of customers might subject the CEO or the board to prison.
If a company doesn't do that, or does but wants to stop, it will be in favor of the regulation and against that suit.
That is for whatever reason they have for not wanting to do it. Except, maybe for not doing it for publicity reasons and exploiting that fact with a large campaign.
Who knows what evidence will finally get someone to get off the fence, so the more evidence of whatever type and especially own goals like this are welcome
Given that half the country loves the party that is anti-regulation, "small" government, I don't think you have your finger on the pulse of the nation, so to speak.
Not only would many people in the US be against this on principle ("the feds should stop meddling", "the free market will sort it out"), but the companies in question would invest lots of money into propaganda that many, many people would fall for.
My interpretation is that most people supporting that party may have bought into deregulation rhetoric, but would vote for any specific regulation that curbs a behavior they personally dislike unless a more stout believer talked them out of it.
The people you’re referring to, aka Republican voters, are mainly being led around by the nose. To be more specific, it’s my view that they view politics as a team sport and as entertainment and don’t think through their positions.
These people would be against maintaining their own lives if the Dems were for it.
The people he's referring to are probably best described as libertarian. "Republican" has been abused so much as a word (Democrat, too) that it's effectively useless to describe anything these days anyways.
Case in point: you're using it here to describe people who are not particularly wise to propaganda, which has nothing to do with the word at all. You're probably referring to social conservatives, but it's always hard to tell if comments like these are meant to be a strawman on purpose or not.
Then you're strawmanning, because of course this has nothing to do with the Republican voters writ large. Nothing really does, because as I already stated, the word is meaningless now. It's just the vague "enemy".
Put it to a nationwide vote and you'll watch the money flow into the ad campaigns and half your friends will start telling you how important it is to smash the "regulatory shadow state" and "unelected bureaucrats" or whatever the talking points are.
When you hear about situations like this, where something useful and popular nation-wide gets shut down under the guise of deregulation, the tenth amendment, states' rights, etc., it's never about self determination. It's about this, letting people with lifetime appointments decide the law of the land.
It goes from big issues, like cannabis, reproductive rights, gun control, all the way down to common sense consumer protections like this. That's why I'm weary about about politicians who thump "states' rights" & "self determination", but never seem to put forward any big ticket ballot propositions.
In general the courts shouldn't be pushing big ticket ballot propositions... That isn't their place. The reason they're not elected is explicitly so they can't be (to the maximum extent possible) affected by the ballot box.
A lot of people seem to forget but the maximum amount of democracy isn't the best. Mob rule is not a good system of government.
“Mob rule” is often just this hand wavy argument a party invokes when it wants to force its unpopular positions on the rest of the country or, in the GOP’s case, to defend the electoral college which gives them disproportionate political power.
When did Mitch McConnell say “the American people should decide,” aka the “mob”? When he wanted to block a SCOTUS appointment for almost a year. Suddenly the mob was wrong when the shoe was on the other foot and the window of time was barely over a month.
Good faith “mob rule” arguments are rare. It’s mostly just an easy appeal to shut down otherwise valid arguments.
No "mob rule" is a direct democracy system that is effectively tyranny of the majority. That system does not and cannot work. All forms of practical democracy are some measure away from that, to varying degrees.
Secondly, the electoral college does not give the GOP disproportionate political power. That's a misunderstanding of how it works.
I know what it literally means, what I’m saying is the vast majority of appeals using it are in bad faith.
As to your second point, see: the senate. Democrats have 1 more seat which basically translates to 52% of the country to the GOP’s 48%, yet they actually represent 36% more of the country (204mill vs. 150mill) than Republicans do when looking at the populations they represent. It doesn’t have to be one-to-one, but surely you can see that the difference here is striking? This is a consequence of all states getting the exact same number of senators.
The Electoral College and the Senate are not the same thing and are entirely unrelated to each other.
So which are you talking about exactly? Maybe you're just quoting things you heard by rumor?
But seeing as you changed the argument to the Senate, I'll respond to that.
The Senate was never and is not supposed to be representative of the population. It's supposed to be representative of the states. This is a good thing to keep. That's also why things like Governors being able to simply pick replacement senators without having an election is allowed.
Honestly that was meant to be part 2 of a 2 part thing and I just completely forgot to write part 1.
Until the most recent census was finished and electoral map updated (which has been years of work due to unpacking the census plus several states fighting over redistricting) the democrats had to overcome an ~5pt disadvantage to even begin winning due to how the maps are drawn and the FPTP system. Republicans had a distinct advantage which is now a smaller advantage (~1.3-1.7 IIRC). Still, if I was running for president I’d rather be on the side that starts with the weight slightly in their favor. Especially given the razor thin margins elections are seeing now.
You can’t lose the popular vote and win the presidency that many times without raising eyebrows. They clearly have electoral and other structural advantages that are well documented at this point. They have won the popular vote I believe 1 time in the last 8 elections. They haven’t won it since 2004. I guarantee you they’ll lose it again this year no matter the electoral outcome. No one even debates it anymore in predicting the outcome, it’s just assumed.
The demcorats consistently govern/represent far more Americans and have to overcome an electoral college disadvantage that is now just a slight disadvantage. We can argue all day about whether or not you agree that’s how things should be, but the math is clear here. There really isn’t a whole lot to debate.
The democrats having to overcome a 5pt disadvantage (I haven't checked if this is even accurate) would just be because of the lag in the system with people moving to blue states from red states. If the reverse happens then it'll be biased in the other direction. It's not a structural bias toward one party or the other.
Gerrymandering can absolutely causes biases, but gerrymandering is performed by both sides.
Saying it's "consistent" when we're only talking about the past 20 years I think is a bit much.
I feel like that's too over-confident. They'll just do what corporations have been doing for decades. Invest in PR that paints this as protecting the American way and American values, and all the other nonsense corporations will use to convince voters to vote against their best interests.
maybe I'm unusually optimistic, but I feel struggling with a BS subscription is a fairly bipartisan and universal experience here. It's not quite like how you can sell to the affluent how they deserve more and there are leechers taking from society. The leeches are the subscription companies.
If you want to lock customers into a contract then call it a contract. Every subscription plan very ominously states "this is not a contract" so the company has no obligation to provide the promised level of service and can change the plan at any time. Yet here they are arguing that customers don't have the right to terminate a subscription. That's called a contract and you can't have it both ways.
Way back... I think it was the WSJ or Wired, can't remember, where I couldn't change/delete my card details - except one field - once I had subscribed. So the only way to cancel the recurring subscription was to change the cvv code.
I'd love to have a convenient way to transfer a phonecall to a message playing on loop, continuously without gaps for the other end to respond. e.g. "take me off your spam list immediately".
"onerous new regulatory obligations regarding disclosures, how those disclosures are communicated, a "separate" consent requirement, regulations of truthful company representative communications with customers, and prescriptive mandates for service cancellation, among others."
Translation: "WTF, how dare you suggest that we have to stop deceiving and ripping off our customers? We aren't prepared to do business honestly! This is an outrage!"
Note: California has this same type of law scheduled to go into effect in July. Can't wait!
> same type of law scheduled to go into effect in July
As near as I can tell, that's the real rub here - this is not a law,, nor was it directly enacted by legislation. It's a regulation written independent of lawmakers, and the question is whether the FTC has the authority to write this specific set of regulations.
I'm hoping the cable companies lose but we should be aware of the consequences of allowing uncheck regulatory rule making outside the scope of congress.
You're absolutely right on that point. I am so frustrated at the massive vacuum left by our worthless federal legislative branch. It seems like "both sides" of the political aisle are feeling the same: Executive branch attempts to do something in an arguably commonsense way to solve a real problem, the guilty parties who caused the problem run to the courts for relief (usually on the grounds of lacking clear authority from Congress), courts agree and (often very explicitly) encourage Congress to pass a law if they think this authority ought to exist, and Congress resumes furiously fundraising and meeting with their donors.
Edit: I know in general it's the left who "likes to regulate things" but a relevant example on the right would include regulating things like immigration.
1 and 3 are pretty related problems. Freezing the size of congress means each representative covers more population, so getting their election message out is more expensive, forcing representatives to raise more money.
With a magic wand I’d massively increase both the house and senate, publicly fund elections, and switch to 3 member mixed districts to increase the chances every citizen of a district has someone they feel reasonably represents their major views.
The other outcome of the increased population ratio is that it becomes very cheap to buy a law. If you can convince one representative to vote your way you've captured the votes of 770 thousand people. That's a juicy conversion rate. A larger Congress would raise the cost of K-street. Shifting the balance of political power back to the electorate.
I’d certainly rather try that than keep with our fully failed system, but I’m curious: with so many members (from both resetting the constituent ratio to what the original one was, plus multi-member districts), would it start to physically look like the Galaxtic Senate? Maybe a basketball arena packed with representatives? Clearly we are now equipped for simple votes to be taken instantly even in those quantities, but part of me thinks that this would be tough because ultimately 22,000 people can’t have a floor debate together unless in practice only a handful actually matter. Same for committees of say, 10x the current size.
I’m not saying it’s worse than what we have now, I’m actually more curious how the people who would like to see that reform would want it to look in practice so I can know whether I could support it and how I’d argue for it.
Congressional votes don’t need to be secret, so we have tons of technology that would permit remote participation and voting. That also frees up members to spend more time physically in their district.
When I’ve pictured this it’s with member counts in the low to mid thousands, not tens of thousands.
Floor debates are already mainly performative, with little bearing on changes to bills. All the real work happens in committee and by the Speaker’s office. I’d think about embracing this with more different caucuses of various members who come together on specific issues and bring versions of bills and amendments for committees to adopt or reject, maybe even a few levels of committees to build consensus slowly so the final floor vote is more formality than debate.
Congress gave the FTC power to enact rules so that Congress doesn't have to fiddle with every single little complaint or item over all of society. What do you think FTC stands for?
Here's the Congressional passed statutes regarding the FTC [1].
In particular note that 15 U.S.C 41-58 includes that the FTC "is empowered... to .. prescribe rules defining with specificity acts or practices that are unfair or deceptive, and establishing requirements designed to prevent such acts or practices" among many other similar things.
The phrase "unfair or deceptive" occurs 56 times in the FTC charter. Go read it.
Well what is the actual law here? What made this fair for decades, according to the law, and suddenly unfair and deceptive today even though there has been no actual change to the law? (I would argue that it was unfair and deceptive all along, but that's not what the law said). Laws were meant to be something more permanent and reliable than something which can just be changed on the whim of some bureaucrat.
It's hard to see the steelman case for this. The transcript of their objections at the initial hearing are on page 13 of the transcript [1]
> The FTC's highly prescriptive proposal requiring numerous disclosures, multiple consents and specific cancellation mechanisms is a particularly poor fit for our industry. Our members offer services in a variety of custom bundles. They're provided over a wide range of devices and platforms. Consumers, for example, frequently subscribe to a triple play bundle that includes cable, broadband and voice services. They may face difficulty and unintended consequences if they want to cancel only one service in the package.
> The proposed simple click-to-cancel mechanism may not be so simple when such practices are involved. A consumer may easily misunderstand the consequences of canceling and it may be imperative that they learn about better options. For example, canceling part of a discounted bundle may increase the price for remaining services. When canceling phone service, a consumer needs to understand they will lose 9-1-1 or lifeline services as well. Especially important, low-income consumers could be deprived of lower-cost plans and special government programs that would allow their families to keep broadband service.
I mean, except for the 9-1-1 point, I guess I feel like all of those policies -- the bundling in particular -- should ALSO be disallowed.
Ironically you can counter all these arguments almost perfectly with the inverse:
"Customers may not know what they are signing up for or may only want to sign up for one service rather than the bundle"
But of course, they only feel the canceling part would be bad, not the signing up part (which is also ridden with dark patterns and deception to fool customers).
Exactly, if anything the risks to the consumer of entering into a new contract-for-a-service are overwhelmingly greater than the risks of canceling the same. (Especially for a Disney+ account :P [0] )
>"All wireless phones, even those that are not subscribed to or supported by a specific carrier, can call 911. However, calls to 911 on phones without active service do not deliver the caller’s location to the 911 call center, and the call center cannot call these phones back to find out the caller’s location or the nature of the emergency. If disconnected, the 911 center has no way to call back the caller."
Requiring carriers to enable whatever side-channel is necessary to transmit location info to the 911 PSAP shouldn't be a heavy lift.
The callback issue seems harder to resolve, but even if a handset has no assigned phone number, there are other ways to address it (e.g. IMEI). Carriers should be required to build in a capability to make this work.
> Requiring carriers to enable whatever side-channel is necessary to transmit location info to the 911 PSAP shouldn't be a heavy lift.
Carriers can and they should.
> The callback issue seems harder to resolve, but even if a handset has no assigned phone number, there are other ways to address it (e.g. IMEI). Carriers should be required to build in a capability to make this work.
Carriers can't, because the 3GPP standards do not make this possible.
The one exception to frictionless cancellation could be a big modal warning the customer that cancelling will hamper their 911 service, if what they're doing will actually do so.
Quick primer on how the courts have been successfully weaponized here.
The Federal court system is divided into circuits [1]. Circuits are further divided into districts (eg Eastern District of Texas). In sparsely populated, large areas there districts may be further subdivided into divisions. The idea is you shouldn't need to drive 6 hours to get to a Federal judge.
Each district has an Appeals Court that sits above the District Court so that's what "Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals" means. Above all the circuit appeals courts sits the Supreme Court. Additionally, each circuit has a single Supreme Court judge who is available to hear emergency motions from appeals court rulings. That judge can rule on the motion or refer the matter to the entire Supreme Court.
Judges reflect the politics of the state they're in because of the blue slip system [2]. Presidents nominate judges to Federal courts. A Senator from that judge's state by tradition (ie there's no law for this) essentially can veto that nomination.
Federal district court judges have the power to make rulings and issue injunctions that affect the entire country.
So in Texas we have a perfect storm for judge shopping and a forum to push conservative views through lawsuits. Texas is a large state so the districts are divided into divisions. A division might only have 1-2 Federal district court judges. So if you nominally establish a business in Amarillo, TX you know with a high degree of certainty what judge you'll get when you file a lawsuit. With certain questionable tactics, you can know pretty much 100% what judge you "randomly" get assigned.
This is called "judge shopping".
It's why all the patent cases are litigated in the Eastern District of Texas. It's why any anti-abortion lawsuit always ends up in front of Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk [3] in the Northern District of Texas (eg [4]).
So the Fifth Circuit is conservative because Texas, Alabama and Louisiana are conservative. Conservative judges are usually viewed as more friendly to lawsuits attacking any sort of government regulation. Even if the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals doesn't rule in favor of the cable companies, the matter will go straight to the Supreme Court. This current Supreme Court has shown themselves highly likely to take up the case and intervene, probably in favor of cable companies.
That's because the US wasn't designed to have unelected federal bureaucrats create laws for the entire country. Every state should make their own laws, and then those state's courts could determine if the law is legal or not.
They can't because those same corporate and conservative players will use the Commerce Clause to prevent any meaningful legislation at the state level. You get to choose the color of the billy club of submission but not how it is held or its target.
Exactly. The standard playbook is to attack attempts to do this at the federal level by arguing it's a state decision, and attack attempts to do this at the state level using the excessively broadened Commerce Clause. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn was a horrible overreaching mistake, as was every other expansion of the Commerce Clause.
(There are different playbooks for passing laws that curtail personal rights, by arguing to do it at both the state and federal level, or removing federal prohibitions on something and then enacting it on a state by state basis while trying to pass the reverse at the federal level.)
The Commerce Clause serves no master. It can be used for federal overreach in either direction. For eg. without the a lot of regulatory behavior that the Congress does today is by relying on the Commerce Clause.
That's ahistorical. The Federal court system was established by the Judiciary Act of 1789 [1], the same year the constitution came into force (which established the Supreme Court).
Whenever people bring up "states rights" with objectively false claims, one needs to consider the history of such a claim. It was most prominent in the Secession Crisis and the obvious follow up question is "states rights to do what?" because the answer is "to own people as property".
#1 reason I use proxy cards to pay for subscriptions, all I have to do is pause or delete the proxy card and then I won’t have to worry about complicated cancellation processes
The 5th Circuit has a bunch of ultra radical appointees, who among other things ordered ACA to be eliminated.
ExTwitter's new ToS require cases to be held in their jurisdiction, in Northern Texas, which has particularly wild people.
This is absurd court shopping/forum shopping & this court is slated to unmake a huge huge huge part of the USA. The Supreme Court has chastised them numberous times, but they are going to undo so so much.
Yikes.. of course they filed in the 5th Circuit too. Why pretend there’s any consistent judiciary when you can just forum shop for the most reactionary Appeals court in recent history?
I feel the ACLU or other legal action committee is going to have to DoS this circuit to prevent it. If you can’t get on the docket for 10 years, it becomes less of an option.
I have nothing to add other than I am so tired of watching the 5th circuit just blatantly legislate from the bench (and in such a partisan way). It's basically a 2nd legislative arm at this point controlled by one political party.
Not knowing much about this and just going from your link (honestly I don't even know which side the 5th and 9th are on)... 5/10 and 8/10 are not all that close. 5/10 seems to give the 9th one of the lower rates of reversal, given that so many of them are 1/1.
Scroll down to the first vertical bar graph. Sixth is reversed over 80% of the time, Ninth right behind it. Fifth, Eighth and the State Courts comprise the second cohort in the 70-ish percent range. Note that these are conditional probabilities; we’re observing cases SCOTUS took on.
Because one single term departure from a mean isn't much of a trend. when you have a 17 year data set and a 1 year data set, I dont think it is very reasonable to limit examination to a single year unless there is a reason why that might be different. The most recent year is in the larger data set.
I can concede that somewhat, fair point. Frankly I shouldn’t get bogged down in these numbers because as I said in another comment: I'm not sure how the 9th possibly having issues somehow undermines the problems with the 5th. This is pretty textbook "whataboutism."
I'm also not sure why reversals are the metric we are going off of here to decide if a court is partisan/legislating from the bench. You're asserting that as if it's self-evident.
Im not asserting anything about partisanship- that would have been someone else.
That said, I agree this isnt a contest. "whataboutism" is only useful insofar as it demonstrates that this is not a phenomenon exclusive to either the 5th OR 9th circuits. Having sent that topic to bed, the question is what (if anything) reversals mean.
To me, they simply mean that the courts are in disagreement with the SCOTUS. Circuits have different opinions, just as the supreme justices have different opinions.
I dont think it is unreasonable the presume that the SCOTUS legal philosophy falls between that of the most liberal circuit and most conservative circuits. This is not in of itself unexpected or a condemnation. If every court was in perfect harmony, we wouldn't even need the appeals process.
One can ask if the legal opinions held by the 5th or 9th courts pass the red face credibility test, but I agree reversals alone wont tell you that. you would have to get into the weeds.
I don’t think that reversals meaningfully tell us anything that answers the question we are engaging in. At best they are a small piece of the equation.
I'm not sure how the 9th possibly having issues somehow undermines the problems with the 5th. This is pretty textbook "whataboutism."
I'm also not sure why reversals are the metric we are going off of here to decide if a court is partisan/legislating from the bench. You're asserting that as if it's self-evident.
I'd be curious to see where you saw me say the 9th circuit hasn't also engaged in this behavior.
When we talk about Google or Microsoft or whoever doing something shady/unwanted, do we have to list every other major company that also engages in bad behavior? Am I obligated to list every single appellate court with issues or am I allowed to focus on the one we are talking about right now?
I don't think anybody is pretending that lawmakers are doing their jobs.
That's why people keep looking to the courts. Congress can't even pass the most fundamental law -- appropriations to keep the government open -- in a timely manner. Everybody is well aware that Congress is incapable of passing any law more pertinent than renaming a post office.
Unfortunately, that's the result of everybody's individual Congressperson doing exactly what they're sent to do. Which is: stop the opposing party's legislators from accomplishing anything.
[Note: This will not be an anti-Cable-company screed]
The American legislative system is bizarre.
To begin with, Congress is accorded very little power by the constitution, with most of it resting with "We the people" or the states.
This however, doesn't pattern match with the amount of power some people (typically progressives) _think_ the Congress or government _ought_ to have, or the amount of power Congress _wants_ to have (as much as possible), so we see BS things like the abuse of the Commerce Clause loophole to justify any Congressional intervention.
Now, you'd think that with all this power that they have loopholed their way into, they would actually exercise it, but that doesn't actually happen, because they are permanently gridlocked and can't pass any damn shit unless it's part of a giant 1000-page omnibus bill that has 100 unrelated things clubbed together based on whatever horse-trading they manage to do one day before the govt shutdown deadline.
So what actually happens is that the actual rule-making is done by the executive, in the form of these government agencies, which ideally should be enforcing things that the Congress has passed, but effectively are given pseudo-legal power through a variety of judicial interpretations (eg. the Chevron Doctrine) that can be overturned by the next Supreme Court as trivially as they were written in.
All in all, you get a massively dysfunctional system where regulatory agencies act as effectively unelected lawmakers, with the actual lawmakers doing jackshit, and the judiciary effectively supporting these shenanigans through capricious rulings.
And while doing all this, lawmakers can conveniently ramp on the rhetoric during campaigning because they know they don't actually need to do anything. They didn't even pass abortion-related legislation for 50 whole years, because they could use that division to reap votes every election cycle.
> Congress is accorded very little power by the constitution
Congress doesn't have universal power, but the power it is explicitly listed is actually a lot broader than you make it sound. Some particularly powerful grants of power include:
1. commerce clause gives power to "regulate commerce...among the several states". As always the wording is vague, but it can reasonably be interpreted to be VERY broad. And it generally has been interpreted broadly. Why does the government have the power to criminalize drugs? Because there's an interestate market for drugs, basically. If you can criminalize possesion of a substance under the commerce clause, you can sure as shit regulate shady subscription practices by national chains.
2. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments guarantee a bunch of rights and then grants congress power generic enforcement power. Enforcing such powerful and varied rights can reach into a lot of things.
3. Congress can raise and then spend money however it wants. So unless it violates a right, congress can basically empower the executive to do ANYTHING that money can buy.
4. The necessary and proper clause gives power to "make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution". This really encourages broad reading of the explicitly listed powers and is used to justify congressional oversight, applying federal law to all kinds of random situation.
Moreover when it comes to the agency power, they effectively have the COMBINED power of the executive (which they are part of) and whatever powers the legislature has given them.
> Congress is accorded very little power by the constitution
No law can be made without them. They have tremendous power.
> So what actually happens is that the actual rule-making is done by the executive, in the form of these government agencies
The FTC was literally created by an act of Congress, which explicitly gave them the power to enact rules like this. See my other comment on this page where I like the laws.
Do people simply hear whatever their favorite politics pundit spews and take that at face value? It's so easy to simply look google such things.
> Congress is accorded very little power by the constitution, with most of it resting with "We the people" or the states.
It's a brilliant way to specify powers to a legislative body, essentially a nation-state equivalent of Linux's "don't break userspace" directive. In both cases objections can bubble up from the bottom to the top, with courts being the equivalent of a mailing list post, "Hey, this new code breaks my use case! Fucking change it back!"
In both cases one could argue about the implementation matching the aspirations of the concept. But to find the basic concept itself "bizarre" is to signal to the world that you don't understand one of the basic tenants of the constitution.
We are talking past each other. First off, I am describing the whole scenario as bizarre, not the first sentence of my post. That much should be obvious.
Second, I _do_ understand the basic tenets (not tenants, btw) of the constitution, that's why I was able to describe them in my comment.
What I am trying to point out is that the Constitution as written is at odds with what a lot of people want (eg. progressives want a more authoritative state, with vaccine mandates as an example), and since they can't change the constitution easily, we have developed a complex web of quasi-legal systems in order to loophole our way around the constitution.
The judiciary and legislature are complicit in this.
The Commerce Clause has been expanded to basically include everything under the Sun (something that should be bothering you if you understand the basic tenets and the spirit of the constitution), which means there is very little left that the Congress cannot legislate on. However, the Congress then actually legislates on very little, sticking itself in permanent gridlock, and actual policy effectively being created ex-nihilo by federal agencies, which should ideally have only been enforcing them.
This was done with the agreement of the courts, but remember they can as easily choose to disagree tomorrow.
> Anyone with knowledge who can expand this or explain what exactly is "arbitrary", "capricious" or "abuse of discretion"?
I'm a lawyer. Here's a summary from Perplexity.ai, which comports well with my general understanding:
The U.S. Supreme Court defines "arbitrary and capricious" in the context of administrative-agency action primarily through the standards set forth in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). According to the APA, a court must invalidate agency actions that are found to be "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law" 1 3 4.
The arbitrary and capricious standard is applied when reviewing an agency's decision-making process and involves several key considerations:
Consideration of Relevant Factors: An agency action is deemed arbitrary and capricious if the agency has relied on factors that Congress did not intend it to consider, failed to consider an important aspect of the problem, or offered an explanation for its decision that runs counter to the evidence before the agency 2 3.
Rational Connection: The agency must demonstrate a rational connection between the facts found and the choices made. This requires a satisfactory explanation for its action based on consideration of relevant data 6.
Consistency and Reasoning: The decision should not be based on seriously flawed reasoning or be inconsistent with prior actions unless adequately explained. The agency must also respond to relevant arguments or comments during the decision-making process 6.
Zone of Reasonableness: Recent interpretations by the Supreme Court have introduced the concept of a "zone of reasonableness," where agency actions are upheld if they fall within a reasonable range of decisions based on the agency's expertise 4.
And HNers have interpreted that as, "Any comment that even mentions the output of an LLM is radioactive toxic waste, regardless of its context or its appeal to the audience's sense of intellectual curiosity that is otherwise encouraged by the admins."
As a result, a lot of thoughtful conversation threads are stopped in their tracks.
No one is stopping conversation. We weren't allowed to have the coversation, because someone would rather outsource their efforts to AI, which isn't thoughtful or inspiring curiosity within the writer, regardless of the perception upon readers. It's lazy and it degrades the discourse because we're not interacting with the author of the comment when we read words that aren't theirs, and allows for those who use AI to simply say that the words were not their own, as if that abdicates them of responsibility for what they post under their own account/username.
Not all AI comments are downvoted like this one was, which should tell you that this just wasn't a very good comment, AI or not.
I'm making no judgement(s) at all. I'm observing that it was downvoted and flagged and is now dead, which is the judgement of HN collectively, not my own.
If you feel that your comment is flagged in error, please contact hn@ycombinator.com
It may have been a very fine comment in another context, but it appears to not have been a good comment on HN, as determined by HN. What other metric would apply?
It's not Ludditism. You're just making low-effort posts that are not appreciated on HN as evidenced by downvotes and past moderator statements. I don't even know what you're arguing for.
Just write your own comments. You actions in this thread reflect poorly on yourself as a lawyer and upon the entire legal profession.
Please cite your source for the supposed HN policy. I sometimes answer nonlawyers' questions about how the law works; my answers often attract upvotes. If purists insist on downvoting AI-assisted answers, I can live with that.
> If purists insist on downvoting AI-assisted answers, I can live with that.
I'm no purist. I have seen AI comments that have genuinely been helpful on here, so I don't know what else to say, other than that I also have had to accept that sometimes HN doesn't roll the way I'd like either, but it's still the best place to post online the vast majority of the time.
To your original point:
> I see no reason to spend non-billable time writing an evanescent answer to a very-general question. Perplexity did a quite-serviceable job in just a few seconds.
I don't think posting on HN is meant to be measured in time, but in impact. I don't come here to read AI comments, but human comments. I'd wager the same is true of nearly everyone here, including you.
There are lot of grey areas; for example, your GP comment wasn't just generated—it came with an annotation that you're a lawyer and thought it was sound. That's better than a completely pasted comment. But it was probably still on the wrong side of the line. We want comments that the commenters actually write, as part of curious human conversation.
> I’m a lawyer and I would not be comfortable doing this outside of perhaps the message board context.
Why is that? I flatter myself that it provides useful content for readers, and there's approximately zero chance that it could ever lead to any kind of malpractice liability. (My perspective might be influenced by the fact that I've done a lot of law-related teaching over the course of my career, for both lawyers and non-lawyers, and have never had even a whisper of an issue on that score.)
Doing this in the message board context: very low risk as you said. Don’t disagree at all. Downside risk: lots of downvotes. Who cares.
Doing this in the paid legal advice realm: why not at least ask Westlaw, which your insurance carrier would be less allergic to? Asking a general purpose chat it seems like it’s asking for trouble.
Helping people understand the law: pretty cool however biased I may be.
We're on the same page: I can't imagine giving paid legal advice without doing the usual research and citing the usual cases, for no other reason than to confirm what I think I know.
That’s squared up with me. I would not trust myself to second guess Peplexity without researching and at that point why am I messing around slash wrecking a/c priv?
But good on you for giving layman’s style explanations. I do think that’s good work.
Would your answer have been different if I'd quoted from — and approved of — say, Wikipedia? or Cornell Law's Legal Information Institute? If not, then your beef is that the comment was drafted by an AI, and only humans should be involved in producing any text that's to appear on HN?
I think that’s consistent with my views and my understanding of HN Guidelines and clarifications by Dang, though I don’t speak for HN.
The issue to my mind is that AI doesn’t perform reasoning and may give different answers entirely depending on prompts and on sources the AI references, sources that may not be clear to the user or secondary readers.
Other sources have the benefit of having had more eyes on the same content. With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow kind of thinking.
So it'd have been OK with you if I'd just posted the Perplexity.ai output — which I thought was a very good summary of the law, and I claim to have at least modest knowledge in this area — without identifying it as an AI output.
That doesn't logically follow. HN operates on good faith principles. You'd be posting in bad faith, knowing that posting AI output as your own on HN is frowned upon, and the output didn't really add anything substantive to the discussion because the information provided by the AI output is unverifiable, and as you didn't write it or investigate the sources, you can't really say that it corresponds with reality. You'd have done better to just post the sources that the AI used, if available.
Your responses now seem like sealioning. I don't think that you necessarily are posting in bad faith, but I've already answered the question you asked to which I'm replying to.
> You'd be posting in bad faith, knowing that posting AI output as your own on HN is frowned upon
First, you haven't proved up your "frowned upon" premise. It'd be misguided to peremptorily condemn the posting AI-generated answers when they're initiated, and vouched for, by knowledgeable humans. I've been around HN for awhile and am quite skeptical that this is HN policy — if it is, I'd like to hear it from someone official, or at least to get a link to an HN posting. Those who don't like AI-assisted comments are of course free to downvote them.
Second, the alternative might be that the original questioner doesn't get an answer, or at least not one with any indicia of reliability — how many responses have you seen that are prefaced by "IANAL"? As I've said, I am a lawyer, I use my real name, and I'm vouching for the AI-generated answer as a general explanation.
> Your responses now seem like sealioning.
It's not sealioning, it's Socratic method — looking ahead on the chessboard, examining an assertion's logical implications N moves out. That's what lawyers are trained to do from the first day of law school, because it's how legislators, judges, administrators, and their staffs (try to) achieve scalable, sustainable policies and decisions. It's one form of critical thinking.
> The alternative might be that the original questioner doesn't get an answer, or at least not one with any indicia of reliability
That would be preferable to AI output on HN. That's the stance that HN and dang have taken, so I'll ask him to chime in in this thread for everyone's benefit.
> IMHO, your peremptory condemnation of posting AI-generated answers — when initiated, and vouched for, by knowledgeable humans — is short-sighted.
It's not my policy. I'm only going off of what I've seen dang say to others, so interpret that accordingly.
> You're of course free to express your opinion by downvoting my comments.
I can't downvote comments that are replies to me, yours or anyone else's. You can't either. No one on HN can. The interface doesn't allow it. I didn't flag your comments either for that matter, because I didn't want to derail our discussion, as you can't reply to a comment that is dead. And that's all I'll say on that matter, because:
It's not like I have much sympathy for cable companies, but I can somewhat see their point here. Canceling your cable involves real costs, someone has to come to your home and disconnect it. Then if they quickly regret the decision, they'll be charged a not insignificant fee to be hooked up again.
That said, the cable companies could still work around this. The rules seems to still allow "saves," which could include them contacting you the next day to try and reverse your decision.
The save portion of the rule seems to be a loophole the telecommunications companies convinced the FTC to add for them, it sounded like originally those would be blocked.
The thing they are predominantly fighting is not "I don't want cable anymore". It's not likely anyone who wants to terminate the service permanently is unwilling to spend the time to cancel given the cost of sitting on it.
It's being able to trivially downgrade service packages the same way you can upgrade them. That does not involve a major cost like a technician visit.
I have never had cable activated without a technician coming. I live in a more rural area, but I've also heard other people discuss "the cable guy is scheduled to arrive sometime between 8AM and 4PM."
I think cable boxes change it somewhat, but the last time I had cable and not just cable internet they still had someone come to hook the cable box up. Admittedly, that was fifteen years ago now.
There has been zero reason to physically disconnect the hookup since analog cable was phased out 15 years ago.
It can still be cheaper to send a guy out on service start to ensure the existing hookup is of sufficient quality (hasn’t degraded or been chewed or cut by the last owner) and the new customer isn’t trying to hook it into their aerial or old satellite dish or something. Or if your records are spotty and aren’t certain there’s an existing hookup.
You're right that they probably don't disconnect it. Honestly, I've never considered what happens when it's disconnected, as it's always been when I move out of a place.
Needing somebody to show up to connect it made me assume someone disconnected it, but a status check makes more sense.
> the last time I had cable and not just cable internet they still had someone come to hook the cable box up. Admittedly, that was fifteen years ago now.
15 years is lifetimes when it comes to technology capabilities. They world has moved on from that.
I've had techs "need" to come out for cable internet connection setup, but all they did was the exact same thing I would do myself: connect the coax, plug in the modem, and call a number to say "here's the MAC address, it's plugged in". It's such a waste of time (mine and theirs) and money (depends on if they're jackholes who charge a connection fee or if they eat the cost themselves).
Meanwhile, another cable company I subscribed to last year for internet service just mailed me a kit, with QR codes that handled activation. It didn't work right the first time, and there was a number to call; they realized the problem was on their end and fixed it quickly.
>15 years is lifetimes when it comes to technology capabilities. They world has moved on from that.
I've had cable internet hooked up more recently and still needed a technician, I just stopped getting cable TV about fifteen years ago. Which seems to mirror your experience except last year.
And checking my local providers, I still need to schedule an appointment for a new connection. It seems like it's easier elsewhere.
I don't sympathize because I remember cable being both 1) long term (yearly) contracts instead of monthly and 2) if you cancel early you still have a termination fee. Those should make up for the need to come to your house to deactivate services.
These days, if they need to physically come out to disconnect/reconnect, that's their problem. Mechanisms exist so they can do this remotely; if they're not set up to do that in 2024, they can eat the costs.
Also... who cares? If there's regret and then the customer gets charged a reconnect fee, that's life. People need to learn that making decisions without thinking them through can have consequences.
If the FTC got nothing done but this and it stood up in court it’d be a huge win for society.
I remember the relentless and annoying and capricious and arcane process I had to go through to cancel Comcast for my elderly mother.
Gyms do this, too! Super easy to sign up almost impossible to cancel.