While I'm a bit dubious of how they'll define a 'one click' flow, this is a great move. Maybe auto-subscribing free trials can be banned next?
I live in France, and they do everything possible to make subscriptions hard to cancel - I signed up to my gym online, but if I want to cancel it I need to send their headquarters a physical letter in the post, and expect a 4-6 week processing time haha.
There are a few services in Germany that you can use to cancel a wide range of things. They use exactly the right wording and channels with each of them. They'll send faxes, snail mail, etc. Take care of escalating, etc. Whatever needs doing. Kind of hilarious and sad at the same time that that is a thing.
Interesting, I thought that was unique to the US. What I’m hearing is that Gym memberships are universally predatory. I’m a bit of a cynic and honestly I think Gym memberships somehow will find away to weasel out of this requirement.
Also in France, curious which gym you are talking about.
Went to the three _main_ commercial gym brands, and cancelling did NOT take more than a week including the letter arriving time in one case. The other two were online and with the branch staff.
Cercles de la Forme. To be fair, that's just how the contract I signed describes the cancellation process. I bet if I talked to branch staff they could sort it out.
Heh, this reminded me of the time during high school that I (an American) signed up for an online subscription to "Le Monde" to practice my French. I believe it's different now, but at the time, unsubscribing required sending a letter to their membership department. Cue a very anxious 18 year old sending his first ever international mail and hoping that his command of French was good enough to convey my desire to cancel my subscription.
After moving to the Bay Area, I tried to do the old, "negotiate my bill with Comcast down by threatening to leave" trick, and instead it instantly cancelled my service. I was clicking around on the website trying to figure out how I could talk to the customer retention department when it happened.
I think some companies have already complied with this law ahead of time.
Or perhaps they are/were being selective. If people on certain plans almost never hang around because of the extra steps and never move to a different product instead of leaving after taking to a rep, they might just let those customers go to save effort. This is particularly likely for services that were originally loss-leaders to get people in and the company makes nothing from them directly (or makes a small loss).
My first thought was similar - assuming this is truly forcing websites to implement a “one-click” flow, I’m worried that people will accidentally unsubscribe without an easy way to pick up where they left off. At least an “are you sure?” button would be nice. (Although I hate companies who force me to choose a reason why I’m ending our relationship)
And all this where the needed regulation is so simple: „one can cancel any subscription the same way it was started“.
Started by clicking on a website? There must be an unsubscribe button.
Sold at my doorstep? Next time your sales people try to sell me something, I can cancel with them. But I could also just go to any office/branch/shop and tell whoever works there that I hereby unsubscribe.
I'll one up you on that: every ecommerce company that ships to your door should also allow you to return the product via simple courier pick-up, with no more clicks required than the purchase.
The trouble arises later on. Say five years down the road, or more. You've enjoyed this service but time to cut back. You forgot how you signed up. The website's different. The company was sold three times and changed domains. Worse, you're dead or incapacitated, and a loved one is trying to do this on your behalf.
What needs to happen is a clear path working backwards from the bank charges to unsub. They're supposed to cram in enough info in the transaction line, but how many times is it a third-party with an all-zero phone number?
Even worse are "discreet" or sensitive services such as porn, that are necessarily circumspect about the transaction details.
That's why I really appreciate middlemen like PayPal. They've got a fantastic dashboard for recurring payments that puts control back in our hands (usually) and lets you simply override the vendor's autopay arrangement.
I am with you that it would be even better if any financial transaction rooted in a subscription should come with a revokation token + url to unsubscribe.
But this sounds like even harder to get, so I’ll settle for the more simple version described above in the meantime.
Here's a fundamental dialectic tension that makes unsubscribing arduous:
Companies are literally banking on long-term subscriptions for their bottom line. If a customer has made a commitment to a gym or a service for 12 months, or 3 years, or perpetuity, then that company is also putting the customer's future payments into their budget projections. Now they DEPEND ON YOU for solvency!
So you can see that a company has a right to send you to retention or make overtures before you outright stop paying them. And you see why so many things have gone to AutoPay where the company extracts cash from your account, rather than waiting on you to write them a check, and doing the dance of late notices, late fees, collection agencies. They simply can't be a creditor to deadbeat customers anymore.
So it behooves us to think long-and-hard before that free trial, or committing to a subscription we probably won't use or want soon. To think about the future difficulty of canceling rather than the cool perks we get today. To think about passing this info on to our loved ones or PoA who'll need to deal with it at some point.
Because it's not merely about the consumer. It's about businesses being able to plan for their own future, and being able to pay their own employees, and keep their lights on. They depend on those subscriptions from us, because they represent loyalty and commitment.
> They depend on those subscriptions from us, because they represent loyalty and commitment.
A subscription that only continues to exist because the unsubscribe process is harder than it needs to be can never represent loyality and commitment, as both require an act of free will.
The act of free will was when you signed up in the first place and consented to being charged until cancellation, yeah? The acts of free will are when you continue using and enjoying their services for N months/years.
An initial commitment and consent leads to interdependence and cooperation. Loyalty and trust must be earned, but provided that they are earned, they shouldn't be flouted in a capricious act. Why are you canceling? You found a cheaper price? A more attractive deal? Service was bad or not worth your money? Most everyone would agree that many commitments entail responsibilities as well. Do you accept responsibility, and liability, as a customer?
If a company sends you to retention or comes up with special offers to keep you as a customer, that is not necessarily malicious behavior: they're demonstrating that they value your business, especially your money and future payments, and they're showing you what it's worth to keep that loyalty and commitment, and that's their act of free will, yes?
The company would say that the retention process is still subject to free will, but they've got policies, you signed on to those policies, so let's follow the policies. Your free-will act is to decline those come-ons; it's your free will to refuse to run the gauntlet, but hey, caveat emptor?
Can I one-click unsubscribe from my landlady? One-click close a bank or brokerage account? One-click renounce citizenship? Will California legislate 1-click Divorce Equality? Why not?
It is not a "totally different topic" IMHO, but a spectrum of loyalty and commitment.
I don't know the magnitude of the expatriate phenomenon for US citizens. But it would seem that, if a country (e.g. Sudan, Cuba, Vietnam) encounters an atmosphere for people to flee and leave and renounce their citizenship, as refugees, asylum seekers, or immigrant workers, then that nation is losing their #1 most valuable resource. Does not your country depend on its citizens for wealth, peace, labor, and a future? By analogy, only by weak analogy, does a company depend upon subscribers for the same sorts of things.
I'm just saying that if the bonds of marriage no longer mean much at all, and we're all tenants renting our homes, rather than lifelong spouses or landowners, then the value of loyalty and commitment is already diminished, so who cares if I cancel my Cable TV?
> Sold at my doorstep? Next time your sales people try to sell me something, I can cancel with them. But I could also just go to any office/branch/shop and tell whoever works there that I hereby unsubscribe.
Um, why though? If you bought it at the doorstep, you'll need to wait for 12 months before we come to your doorstep, whats this about "branches and shops"? You said "the same way" didn't you? ;)
In this very orange website. Any EU regulation seems to be anathema and a barrier to innovation, and that extends to things that improve user privacy and such.
The joke is that every single time an article about EU tech regulations comes out, a bunch of people sneer that this is why Europe doesn't have FAANGs.
Is this serious? Do you know where most of the "FAANG" tech giants all hail from? Or where a bunch of VC's/accelerators are at? California is not left wanting for more tech innovation.
not the OP but pretty sure it was sarcasm and choosing ASML and Alibaba specially because they are based in countries that are not know for their lack of regulation.
It says, "A prominently located direct link or button which may be located within either a customer account or profile, or within either device or user settings."
I think where the interpretation that one-click sub == one-click unsub is from this passage:
"The ability to cancel or terminate an automatic renewal or continuous service pursuant to subdivision (c) or (d) shall be available to the consumer in the same medium that the consumer used in the transaction that resulted in the activation of the automatic renewal or continuous service, or the same medium in which the consumer is accustomed to interacting with the business, including, but not limited to, in person, by telephone, by mail, or by email."
The idea being that one-click is a medium, which doesn't seem to be the intent here.
Austria requires consumer subscriptions to allow to be cancelled by email and the result has been a free website[1] that maintains a list of all the places you got to email to, lets you sign a cancellation letter with your government electronic id. I cancelled probably pretty much everything this way over the last 10 years and it has been great.
I'd be happy if Washington state even just had something matching the current CA Automatic Renewal Law (ARL) as amended in 2018 (e.g. online subscribers should be able to cancel online). Unfortunately we don't have this in Washington State. I can sign up for a recurring Seattle Times subscription online but cannot cancel or modify it online for example.
You can use a digital credit card like from privacy dot com, use CA as your address bc it doesn’t matter for those cards, and then get easy unsubscribe? You can also deactivate privacy cards in one click too
This is off-topic but, I really don't get why some of those websites are blocked for some countries. For example I'm trying to reach from Türkiye but it seems they blocked the access through here.
I wonder how this will affect companies' retention strategies. They might need to focus more on providing actual value rather than relying on cancellation friction.
We should be targeting this law at the credit cards, not the companies: The credit cards should list all subscriptions in a single place on your credit card bill, and the credit cards should handle unsubscribe in a common, and consistent way.
Try to cancel a Vodafone cable internet contarct in Germany.
From the geography that gave you GDPR when will we have mandatory one-click unsubscribe, with clear cut explanations of will happen, additional costs if existing, and when the contract ends.
Receive an E-mail, click on this link. What could possibly go wrong? Us common folk will never be smart enough to comprehend the wisdom of our leaders.
>I thought the market will do what customers want?
Who's still making that argument? The invisiblle hand died at least 30 years ago. So the endgame is simply monopolization (especially since the FTC has been getting gutted for a decade now, and is being gutted in real time). And monopolization removes choice.
WOuld be it awesome if we could all band together and protest against any site that makes subscription cancellation hard? Yes. But it's not very realistic.
Because a free market requires a government to make and enforce the rules. Otherwise, it's not a "free" market but a market dominated by unfair practices.
The people who complain about government intervention are like children complaining about their bedtimes: Unreasonable.
> I thought the market will do what customers want?
I personally NEVER subscribe to anything unless I heavily use it. It's specifically because I fear that I'll have to jump through hoops to unsubscribe.
Try unsubscribing from any printed journal nowadays. Then tell me exactly how many customers want this and why that number is zero. And lastly explain how the supposedly "free" market is going to "self-regulate" this.
That’s the biggest lie of capitalism. I do think in time it does work out largely in that direction but the windy road to get there is ripe with bear traps and pits of despair.
To qualify that statement, if it doesn’t improve shareholder value, it doesn’t matter. And the worst CEOs will take the short term gain for their personal gain over what’s better for the company and thus customers long term.
> in time it does work out largely in that direction
To be fair, that's usually thanks to government interventions and regulations, not thanks to free market staying free.
Markets fail for very known, very well described reasons. When they do, they rarely recover on their own, and the abusive rent seekers only become more entrenched with time (again, in the absence of regulations to curb that).
In this startup community we see a lot of "disruption" (free-market-success) stories, but in the broader world, things don't usually work out that way, and when they do, it's often just to replace one rent seeker with another.
Definitely, my intent wasn’t to hand wave away the role government plays there. The lag that is inherent in some regulatory departments though seems too long and it’s the working class that suffers to most. I think FAA and NASA are good examples of largely well-run departments while the SEC, EPA, and FDA appear to be largely a sham who really let corporations get away with literal murder to the detriment of the greater good. Things have to get extremely bad before they are able to do anything perhaps because their authority is stripped.
This is a totem. Nobody who believes in capitalism thinks anarchy yields efficiency. (Just like nobody advocating against it does so in favour of totalitarianism.) Instead, you've got two groups of people not shouting at each other, but shouting among each other about how stupid a stylised representation of the other tribe's beliefs are. To the degree the groups communicate, it's in embracing the other's exxagerated representations as shows of conformity to their own groups.
Capitalism as the private ownership of the means of production wouldn’t require anarchy. Nationalization is certainly off limits, but a government that exists solely to maintain a capitalist status quo could still exist. In that case, we could imagine that advocates for a pure capitalism would want the abolition of social services, a flat (if any) tax, the smallest military necessary to prevent invasion, and so on. I’d argue this looks quite similar to the platforms of republicans furthest to the economic right, eg rand paul. The other side’s extremists, ie those who would call for centralized or public ownership of industry, have practically no mainstream political relevance. The closest you’ll get at the federal level are advocates for the nordic model. This unbalanced setup is very unsurprising if you consider that the overton window centers around normalcy, and the most normal perspective in America is a predominantly capitalist system with some labor protections, taxes, and unemployment tacked on.
All of this is unnecessary to mention, however, because you can easily find people arguing, all the time, that the invisible hand naturally prioritizes the desires of customers. This is such a default position that I’m pretty sure I was actually taught that in school (Mississippi to be fair).
Despite me calling out a lie of capitalism, you’re not wrong at all and I completely agree with you. I suppose I went to school in a cult of rationality.
That's the point, though. You didn't. Not because what was said is true. (It's not.) But because nobody honestly preaches it--certainly not here.
Arguing about the specifics of regulation is hard. Simpler to devolve to tribal identification, pretending somebody is seriously arguing for a rules-free or greed-free utopia when nobody is. It's just folks pretending others are.
I live in France, and they do everything possible to make subscriptions hard to cancel - I signed up to my gym online, but if I want to cancel it I need to send their headquarters a physical letter in the post, and expect a 4-6 week processing time haha.