Cable companies, advertising firms, and newspapers are asking courts to block a federal “click-to-cancel” rule that would force businesses to make it easier for consumers to cancel services. Lawsuits were filed yesterday, about a week after the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that “requires sellers to provide consumers with simple cancellation mechanisms to immediately halt all recurring charges.”
The 5th Circuit is generally regarded as the nation’s most conservative, but the 6th Circuit also has a majority of judges appointed by Republican presidents. When identical lawsuits are filed in multiple circuits, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation randomly selects a court to handle the case.
The NCTA cable lobby group, which represents companies like Comcast and Charter, have complained about the rule’s impact on their ability to talk customers out of canceling. NCTA CEO Michael Powell claimed during a January 2024 hearing that “a consumer may easily misunderstand the consequences of canceling and it may be imperative that they learn about better options” and that the rule’s disclosure and consent requirements raise “First Amendment issues.”
“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”
Yeah even if you literally cannot get their service and they have to cancel you (which happened when I moved) they still talk and talk and talk way more than is necessary for a cancellation. They even look up your location data so they can confirm what you already told them their own app said, screw these fuckers.
I swear if you’re the kind of sociopath that’s pro-Trump, them saving this rule alone should be enough to get you to vote Harris.
Yippee! The death of cable is fast approaching, hopefully.
Just in time for the rapid enshitification of streaming services…and the cycle repeats. Greedy people always ruin all the good things we have.
But how will we force you to listen to some agent in the Philippines ramble on about how great the service is, and offer you a 6 month promo rate that you will forget about??
if im cancelling, you trying to talk me out of it is not only a waste of my time it is a fruitless endeavor. just cut it and move on,leeches
But usually the retention departments have the most leeway to give you discounts 😀
Just call and threaten to cancel and suddenly you get 50% off for 6 months or something.
(Works very well with Audible, the further you go in the cancel flow on the website, the bigger discounts you get - you can repeat the “I quit” threat about once a year.)
doesnt matter. shoddy service isnt worth any kind of discount.
I have great service. I just hate that I have to play the game of “pretending to cancel”.
my current service is also pretty good. the one i got when i moved here 4 years ago was trash though. not for anything they did other than advertise availability here which was sketchy about a week after i signed up. held on for a year hoping it would improve since the area was seeing more people locating in the area but nope. same crappy service. so cancelled and went back to a previous vendor as they had been making acquisitions nearby.
I have been very fortunate to have good service for essentially the entirety of my life of broadband. Only going back to when optimum first showed up, they were the only game in town, and it would have issues during times of day when there was too much traffic at the node. Since FiOS showed up (not to shill), it’s honestly been phenomenal, when you put aside the typical bullshit the providers pull. The actual service of packets in packets out, or whatever the Internet is, has been great.
Maybe if their retention rate drops they’ll just lower their costs to those rates, or better their services.
I learned something the last time I had to deal with phony charges. If you tell Visa to not pay for a service or product that you never got, then they won’t pay.
Not that visa is great. They steal your money too. But at least it’s a mechanism to help yourself.
To be fair, users should talk to a subscribe specialist before being able to cancel 🤪
Fuck the circuits. It’s absolute bullshit that entities can game the system and shop for “favorable” judges because of the appellate courts.
I guess they prefer getting customer chargebacks which will cost them bank fees than just letting people cancel.
Fuck you, have a better product.
a consumer may easily misunderstand the consequences of canceling and it may be imperative that they learn about better options
See, if it’s easy to cancel, then a consumer can leave your service, try something else, and then cancel that and come back if they don’t like the alternative.
Also, imperative for who? Your bottom line?
Won’t someone please think of the shareholders!!!
Also wouldn’t the argument apply to subscribing as well? Consumers may not understand the consequences of subscribing to said service. Therefore, “click to subscribe” should also be banned.
I read this as: “the customer has contract terms with us, where if they cancel they must pay termination fees and other fees where applicable and if they cancel they might financially harm themselves”
To which the obvious response would be, well you would list those on the page that you click. (But also… why your business model rely on cancelation fees?)
Definitely then the issue lies with click to subscribe, and not with click to cancel.
If the customer is insufficiently informed of any penalties for cancelling, then he shouldn’t have been allowed to subscribe in the first place.
Also if that’s the case they shouldn’t be able to automatically renew at the end of a contract
Don’t fuck this up 5th circuit.
I know you love to do that, a lot.
Just don’t though, ok?
Imagine if we had 10s of billions a year to drag all these companies and governments into long court battles for OUR rights. Corporations should be second.
They made their own bed here by making it so ridiculously hard.
I was going to a gym and I moved to get out of that $20 a month contract I had to write a letter and deliver it to them by hand.
When I canceled my DirecTV service I was on the phone for over an hour. Half of that was spent waiting for someone.
If you want me to have to talk to somebody before exiting a contract I’m okay with that but I need to talk to them right then and I need them to take no for an answer.
Also the whole raising the rates until people terminate and then offering them lower rates is absolute bullshit
I think waiting on the phone for an hour just to argue with someone to cancel a subscription is reasonable, as long as the signup process also involved waiting on the phone for an hour before an agent tried to talk you out of buying the service.
But if I signed up on a website in 30 seconds, it should take tine or less to unsubscribe on the same website.
That’s the whole point
It’s your internet. Who cancels that without already moving to another ISP? I work from home so not having internet even for short durations is a non-starter. Forcing me to talk to someone is an absolute waste of everyone’s time. They have a zero percent chance of keeping me because I already left. I just want the bills to stop for a service I disconnected from.
I understand the whole ‘game’ for pricing/discounts but when you legitimately are leaving then this is just dumb. I think the whole game around discounts is dumb too but that’s capitalism.
Who cancels that without already moving to another ISP?
In fairness, there are people who renounce their citizenship without first ensuring that they have another citizenship elsewhere. Then they get stuck in limbo because they’re now stateless, and no-one knows where they’re supposed to go.
