Disney, Netflix, and More Are Fighting FTC's 'Click To Cancel … – Slashdot

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Yes, very valid point. But I’m torn on that: I hate that new subscribers, new renters, new whatever get a break, and we who’ve been loyal customers paying into someone’s coffers pay the highest rates? The longer you’ve been a customer, the lower your rate should be, as has been with my car insurance. It would sure help if there was (much) more competition for things like ISP.
If they offer a plan selection at sign-up, they can offer alternative plans when cancelling.
They just can’t make you WAIT with continuing your cancellation until they had some sales-guy call you or do some other stalling.
And it makes it harder for them to progressively scale up the discounts offered as you get closer to canceling.
Any medium used to communicate the information required to sign up and cancel could also be used to communicate such discounts. The argument is garbage. They are just slingly anything they can fabricate desperately to avoid making it easy for people to drop their services.
To me if the company want talk to me to stop me canceling, they should have to pay. If you have to call allow the customer to enter how much they wish to charge per minute, after the first 5 minutes, either waiting, calling back, convincing me not to leave whatever that fee gets charged to company.
To me freedom of speech extends to them speaking not me having to listen, The shouldn’t have the right to charge for me not listening.
The problem here is that entering into a service contract is not the same thing as buying a product. You actually have to properly inform the other party that you’re cancelling the contract. This is why they can go to your bank and inquire about your information and bank will generally be required to give your info. And why things like chargeback and card cancellation work on purchases, but not service contracts. This has been like this for a very long time. The change isn’t “shift in balance of power”. Power in this instance has been this way for a very long time.
And in this case, you did fuck up by not cancelling it and losing relevant information, and then trying to deny other party payment they were in fact contractually entitled to. I’m all for the kind of change being advocated in the story, of making cancelling easier. But I’m vehemently against people just going “fuck the contract I signed, I’m just going to change my card and screw you over” actually working. Do your due diligence if you want to require the other party to do their due diligence. Don’t lose your account info, and if you do, go through the steps to recover it and then cancel your contract. Preferably with easily accessible single click button that says “cancel my subscription” that is accessible after you log into the service.
Everyone should be required to do the dueir diligence. And yes, that includes both the provider and the customer.
If the account is still being paid for then it is not inactive and should not be restricted.
If the account has been restricted then the service is no longer being provided, and you should not be paying for it.
Okay, very good info and perspective. But there’s a huge problem that I see all the time, and I think it’s eroding the entire concept of contracts: “contracts” that contain a clause saying “we reserve the right to change the terms of this contract at any time, without advance notice, and without customer approval”. THAT needs to be 100% illegal, including raising prices.
The way I see OP’s story is that, product or service, Shopify didn’t deliver what OP thought he was buying into. Yes, I know, this gets
“Ghosting” isn’t a proper way to cancel, but is very common so maybe people just accept it as societal norm?
Ghosting is great, and it feels great when you do. In my country we have mobile phone portability. If I want to switch providers, I just need to call the new provider and within 7 days I’m in their network, as long as I don’t have any debt with the previous one. I don’t owe the previous provider any explanation, calls, or anything. I can just LEAVE.
For this reason, when I was paying too much for phone
Someone should be in jail for attaching to your new card without consent.
It’s not like they went and got a court order because you owed them.
When you sign up for a subscription, that IS consent to pay.
Of course you have the right to cancel, but to do that, you have to actually cancel. Until you do that, you’re keeping up that consent.
If for some reason you can’t log in, send a registered letter, but you somehow HAVE to let them know. (In a way that can in good faith be expected to be noticed)

And why things like chargeback and card cancellation work on purchases, but not service contracts.
I’m not sure if this is normal across Europe but my bank allows me to cancel service contracts. They see service contracts as any recurring payment, and I can simply select the payment, click a button, and my bank generates a Power of Attorney form which I sign with my mobile fingerprint and make it officially their problem.
But yes you can’t chargeback but you can cancel a card.

The problem here is that entering into a service contract is not the same thing as buying a product. You actually have to properly inform the other party that you’re cancelling the contract. This is why they can go to your bank and inquire about your information and bank will generally be required to give your info. And why things like chargeback and card cancellation work on purchases, but not service contracts. This has been like this for a very long time. The change isn’t “shift in balance of power”. Power in this instance has been this way for a very long time.
Wow, are you serious?
I am not joking, but genuinely concerned. Here in the EU, it’s not like that, at all. If your card becomes invalid (canceled, expired, locked, you-name-it), it’s endgame. The subscription is automatically canceled.
If a company would go to the bank and request my new card number, that would be illegal (GDPR and legalese stuff). That’s the reason I am using throwaway virtual cards for one-month subscriptions/trials for stuff I am not sure about. If I find the subscription of value to me,
“fuck the contract I signed”
Companies do this all the time. They just call it EULA, TOS, T&C, or things like that. They can cancel your service for any reason, without any explanation provided, and completely ignore all your calls and emails.
They deliberately make it vague and obscure, so you can’t know why it happened. They can unilaterally stop providing service any time they want (as apparently happened to the person you responded to). Sometimes they can even get away with continuing to bill you “acc
“Hi. Joe owes me money. Can you give me his CC number so I can start charging it? Thx!”
Wtf.
It’s worth noting that as is the case with a lot of these sorts of actions, enforcers do talk to each other.
So similar action is being taken elsewhere. In fact, it’s quite likely that it’s enforcers from other countries that brought the problem to FTC’s attention.
I’m pretty sure the FTC already knew.
What I don’t understand is why the FTC doesn’t just slap these companies down.
Isn’t “consumer protection” in their mandate?
Who do you think runs the FTC? I’ll give you a hint, they need to have impressive qualifications and extensive experience…
Amen! I’m tired of dark-pattern cancelling. You fat corporate cats abused your power too many damned times.
They wouldn’t fight it so hard if difficult exits weren’t so profitable.
The problem with that is you can rack up bad credit scores in some countries.
You risk taking a credit hit as someone else pointed out. Also most banks/cards won’t let you stop a recurring payment authorization, only dispute individual charges. I’ve even closed a bank account and opened a new one to try to accomplish this and the bank closed the gap for them to keep charging.
Why bother to include the paywall source if you are going to include a alternative source. Just post the article with the alternative source and forget the paywall.
Actually I prefer the original link and free alternative. That way I know the source of the original article but can still read it if I don’t already have a subscription (NY Times, Business Insider, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc.)
Knowing the original source allows me to gauge the quality of the reporting and the alternate link allows me to read the article if I think the source is creditable.
The best option is the paywalled sites that allow me to read three articles a month without requiring a subscription. That way the original site still sees which articles are popular but three visits a month means I’m not abusing their “guest” allowance.

That way I know the source of the original article
Unless published by a media conglomerate the source of the original article is always in the text of the free article. Not doing so is known as copyright infringement, and media outlets don’t take kindly to that. If the article is from a conglomerate then the “original” will have the same text.
Probably because the paywalled source is the original source, or the one the author of the post learned the info from. Or they may assume we subscribed the last time they used that paywalled site.. Can’t rule out the possibility /. get a monetary reward for referrals on new subscriptions to the paywall site.
Not only TFA is paywall (behind a subscription, no less, I wonder how easy it is to cancel it!) but to make it funnier there’s a subscription level that’s simple and a higher (more expensive one) “without ads” (so presumably for the other one you pay and you still get ads).

“The proposal would also severely curtail or, in some cases, even prohibit companies from communicating with their customers, in violation of the First Amendment,”
My right to free speech should include being able to ring the CEO and and convince them that they are being bastards. They should have to listen or pay my monthly subscription.
This. The quote is disingenuous. The First Amendment does not give you a right to communicate. It gives you a right to speak, no one is ever forced to listen.
According to their QA:
To cancel your Prime membership, click here or you can follow the easy steps below:
        Go to Manage Your Prime membership.
        Click End Membership and Benefits on the left-hand side of the page.
        In the cancellation page, you can click End my benefits or Continue to cancel.
Paid members who haven’t used their Amazon Prime benefits, including FREE Two-Day Shipping, Prime Video, and Prime Music will be eligible for a full refund. Paid members who have used their Amazon Prime benefits may be eligible for a partial refund based on use.
So I went to “Manage Your Prime membership” and looked around, nothing. Turns out that NoScript allowed basically everything but that section of the page.
So I disabled all JS restrictions and the cancel option shows up on the right (not left).
I click “End membership and benefits” and see “Quantaman you still have 3 days left to enjoy your Prime benefits until the next billing cycle”, a pretty clear indication I cancelled.
And at the far bottom two buttons “End my benefits” and “Keep my benefits”… hmmm, guess I’m not cancelled after all.
So I click end membership again, and get another dialogue where I have to end my membership again, and then I see “we’re sorry to see you go”, leading me to think I’ve cancelled again… but of course it’s still active.
There’s yet another three buttons keep membership, pause membership, and cancel membership.
The only way to reliably cancel those services is to take away the credit card.

The regulation’s goal wants “to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up.” and it shows. The reality is some pretend that making it hard to cancel is good for business and the economy, but not, it is not. These companies are stealing from customers, and causing them distress, while simultaneously hoarding funds these buyers would take to some other business. They are really not helping anyone. The BIG problem we have is the girfter large shareholders and lobbyists that benefits from these stocks becoming ever bigger. I hope they can implement this regulation and restore sanity with regards to clients wishes to stop these people from taking their money.
These are the same people that fought against TV remote controls having mute buttons because it infringed on their ‘free speech’ rights.
How is it the saying goes; you have the freedom to say whatever you want, and I have the freedom to not listen to you.
My guess is that they haven’t updated that page for a while, while the “cancel the subscription” sequence is likely being “optimized” all the time to make cancelling more onerous.
P.S. You cannot cancel contractual subscriptions like prime through cancelling a card being billed. In most developed nations, these companies will simply contact the bank to get customer’s billing data and continue billing against new card/bank account. You’re thinking of a process that generally makes it easy to terminate purchas
UK, Virgin Media, same shenanigans, same solution, same result. The worst part was when they claimed that because I owed any particular amount that I couldn’t cancel the service until that amount was paid first.

The only way to reliably cancel those services is to take away the credit card.
That is the only way I have been able to keep my old Amazon Prime truly cancelled.
I learned that if you have even 1 way to buy from Amazon listed in your Amazon profile…Amazon Prime will access that method to charge you the monthly fee.
And that’s how it should be done. I should be able to go to my bank’s website, see which services I have subscribed to, and delete any of them without interacting with the service at all. That’s what the FTC should mandate.
Such a practice is already in breach of EU rules. I actually did manage to accidentally cancel my prime membership while trying to transfer from one country account to another. But the page I landed on did provide me a helpful button to reinstate it and a message that I had until the end of my billing cycle to reconsider my cancellation.
SiriusXM is the worst of the worst. Seriously, fuck those guys. When you call customer service, the person answering doesn’t even have the ability to do it – it has to be farmed off to another team of cajolers. You can do it, but you must calmly deflect try after try.
Put a cancel button on your damned webpage, you pricks. It’s not that hard.
Even worse than that, their cancelation team has limited hours, on weekdays only until 7pm PT, whereas you can activate 24/7 over the phone with a human being .
Beyond just making cancelling no more difficult than signing up, I also feel that if I do not use a service for a complete billing cycle, they should not be allowed to charge for the next billing cycle. If they wish to cancel or suspend service, that is up to them.

Beyond just making cancelling no more difficult than signing up, I also feel that if I do not use a service for a complete billing cycle, they should not be allowed to charge for the next billing cycle. If they wish to cancel or suspend service, that is up to them.
Until I use it, that is.

I also feel that if I do not use a service for a complete billing cycle, they should not be allowed to charge for the next billing cycle.
But you’re still being provided the service. Think about what you said and it’s implications for e.g. insurance.
Another place that “Financial service” companies have dropped the ball.
Subscriptions are things that happen often enough that payment processors should have a process for signing up for them, and for canceling them.
I.e. When I want to cancel, I should be able to talk to VISA, not Comcast.
It doesn’t have to be easy, but it shouldn’t be up to the producer to decide how hard it is.
How would that even work in practice? Payment processors don’t have an exhaustive list of every service provider, up to date contractual listings and points of contact for negotiation and terminating such contracts. Heck, many such things would be impossible to even provide for small businesses in the first place.
And they really don’t want to keep getting sued because yet another moron signed up for a legally binding contract and decided to renege on it. Remember that consumer protections are much stronger

How would that even work in practice? Payment processors don’t have an exhaustive list of every service provider, up to date contractual listings and points of contact for negotiation and terminating such contracts. Heck, many such things would be impossible to even provide for small businesses in the first place.
How do they know it’s okay to charge you periodically if they aren’t keeping track of that information?
Do they just accepting the word of a random company that someone asked to be charged?
They don’t have to know everything about every contract, they already allow you to pay once, they just need to add an option that allows you to make that payment repeatedly, for a fixed amount of time, or until you cancel.

How do they know it’s okay to charge you periodically if they aren’t keeping track of that information?
Do they just accepting the word of a random company that someone asked to be charged?
The company needs to be able to show the bank some proof that you gave your OK to be charged. For practical reasons, this needs to be done only on demand, but if the company can’t provide that after you dispute a charge, it’s chargeback and the fees for it are on the company.
That’s usually enough to curb abuse (or to make sure that you don’t lose money)
And in this case, the company was able to provide a record of your sign-up and your current, cancellation free subscription history.
That’s how all subscription providers do it. You can sign up for subscriptions through Apple App Store or Google Play the same. But they are pretty hefty for that payment handling.
I can’t figure out how to cancel Slashdot. It keep showing up in my browser. WHERE is that cancel button???
Slashdot requires you to edit your hosts file to opt out of the site.
Otherwise, as the song goes, you can checkout any time you like, but you can never leave.

Slashdot requires you to edit your hosts file to opt out of the site.
There used to be a guy here quite helpful with hosts files. I do miss his rants.
It seems like the free market figured this out for gym memberships in the period since Friends made a long joke [imdb.com] about this behavior.
There might be gyms that still do this, but I guess most of them don’t. It’s pretty easy to choose one that doesn’t care to be associated with this meme.
LA Fitness required me to send a snail mail letter to a PO box in order to cancel my membership renewals. It’s right in their fine print which nobody reads.
We have something like that in the EU. To sign up for anything, hell, to BUY anything online, you have to click something that pretty much has to state “clicking this will confirm your order and you will have to PAY for it!”. Recurring contracts have additional checkboxes and mandatory “yeah, I have read this and agree with this and I KNOW THAT THIS IS A SUBSCRIPTION” parts, along with a “yes, I’m an adult” (because selling a subscription to a minor is void on principle).
Anything that didn’t go through this is pretty much void.
It’s annoying as all hell since the default value on all these things of course has to be “no” and you have to actively and manually consent.
And since obscuring the cancel option may well entitle you to not only cancel at any time but also to get your fees (all of them) back, they pretty much go out of their way now to make absolutely CERTAIN you find that cancel button. I now get a “want to cancel? Click here!” link on every phone bill, in the same damn font as their upsell spiel.
It’s annoying. But I can’t really say that they try to hide my ability to get rid of them…
It’s only “click to cancel” if you insist on “click to subscribe”
Had a service once that would not stop billing me, no matter how many times I told them to stop and jumped through their hoops.
I finally canceled the card, and specifically told them when re-issuing the new one, that under zero circumstance was any charge from the old card to be honored.
You, of course, know what happened next.
Closed that account at that bank, went to another bank, they tried the same thing, but were at least willing to charge back and make sure it didn’t happen ever again.
The proposal would also severely curtail or, in some cases, even prohibit companies from communicating with their customers, in violation of the First
No. You are free to communicate with your customer as much as they are willing to listen AFTER you have processed their Cancelation order. If you persuade them to withdraw their cancellation, then you provide them a new agreement and obtain their affirmative confirmation.
This is why I don’t sign up for anything subscription based. Screw them.
“Sirius XM wrote in its comments that one proposed requirement — that companies maintain records of phone calls with customers — would cost the company “several million” dollars a year to comply with.”
Don’t they do this already? Sounds like they are complaining about having to do something they already do.
They already do it. At least if they do any business in the EU because the law that it must be as easy to quit a service as it is to sign up for it IS already a law there.
It’s a bit of a pain but Google is your friend. Just as you use it to figure out Microsoft products, just Google “How do I cancel xyz?” and that should give you the steps.
What do you mean “fight it”? A government entity said that’s how it is, STFU and pound sand! If anyone normal got up and said that it costs them a fortune to comply with a law, we don’t exactly give a fuck either, so why should we now?
They can only make it hard to leave the service, if they have made it at least as hard to sign up.
Let’s not forget about those companies that require 30 (Adobe) or 60 (Netsuite) days written notice to cancel your automatic annual renewal. And then they send you the reminder email that it’s about to renew 30 days before it auto-renews, leaving you with a a do it this instant or your screwed.
Sirius dropped their rate from $20+ per month, to $10 per month (after passing through three layers of customer service), to $5 per month (after 12 months of no service), to $33 per year for 3 years after three years.
Comcast gave me a *hard* no on any discount from $100 per month. I cancelled. No negotiation- they wanted $100. After 8 months, suddenly, they could offer me $60. I’m paying $50 and that’s guaranteed not to increase. I *will* not go back to comcast even if they beat the $50 per month.
N
Check out the news story of the recording this guy made while trying to cancel his AOL account many years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?… [youtube.com]
The employee definitely took it too far, but I’ve been in his shoes. I’ve worked in a call center for a credit card company and customer retention was something that the higher ups always pushed. If they checked your call and you didn’t attempt to retain a customer enough you would get in trouble. If you tried too hard you would also get in trouble. If you didn’t li
All these companies are complaining a lot that they will need to follow similar rules which are already in place in Europe which they already follow. Presumably they realised that customers tell them to sod off more frequently when it is easy for them to do so.
Reference: The EC Unfair Commercial Practices Directive
Literally no one is gonna mention porn sites, I see. They are the actual worst.
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