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Comment by Luctct | Hacker News Reader

The issue is so simple. The companies claim that it would impose heavy costs on them. Well. So it either costs the companies or it costs the consumer. But the consumer is exercising their free choice while the companies are ignoring said choice and forcing them to pay for something they don't want. That's textbook extortion.

Easy solution: impose crippling fines or maybe a little prison sentence here and there for extortion. Why not? That's what it is. Do it and watch how fast the mobsters, I mean, the companies will change their tune.

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A company be responsible for their actions? Where in heaven did you get such a dastardly idea?

The solution to like 90% of all problems: The CEO is legally responsible for every illegal action taken by the company. This is also true for all managers down to the department that caused the illegal action.

That's it. Nothing else. You'll see a massive amount of bad behavior from companies instantly stop. When your neck is on the line, you won't do it. Or you'll quit.

However given history, this will never occur. Unfortunately thats now how we think of commerce, and so companies can try to act as they please with socialized risk and all gain.

There isn’t some bug that can be fixed that would suddenly make this work. DAs, states attorneys and attorneys general have all the power in the world to make life hell for any company doing bad things. They just don’t want to.

Think about that and consider the cascading consequences you’d face for years in most states if you let your driver’s license expire and get pulled over.

Wouldn't this make it possible for a disgruntled employee to do something illegal, and falsely claim they did it on the company's instructions?

The situation we have now is companies setting targets that can only be met by breaking the law and then acting innocent when the employees do. I don't know how we fix this.

Make the board liable as well, under both civil and criminal law.

Include any substantial shareholders, too. Say >= 25% ownership or >= $1,000,000 valuation.

Then recurse that if that shareholder is also corporate. Don't let them just bankrupt empty shell companies, hold the parent companies responsible too.

>The CEO is legally responsible for every illegal action taken by the company.

You think CEO compensation is out of control now? Think about what you'd have to pay someone to be the CEO of any moderately large corporation if that were the case.

You think your boss is up your ass now? Think about what they'll be like when they are strictly liable for anything you do.

I'm not against more executive responsibility, but you have to consider the externalities of your policies.

> You think CEO compensation is out of control now?

The other side of the coin of CEO compensation not being related to real-world concern is that CEO compensation isn't related to any real-world concern.

There is no reason to think it will increase or decrease due to such a change.

I think there's an easier solution that would be less disruptive. Create a legal designation of "executive" and require that every company have at least one (ie the CEO). Anyone in that class bears legal responsibility for the actions of the people they manage. If you follow the standard hierarchy for CFO, CTO then decisions that require specialized knowledge fall on them instead (e.g. if your CFO is committing tax fraud and you didn't know and it's not reasonable that you as the CEO would be able to recognize it then it's only the CFO's problem). Then instead of criminal liability if you're found doing something illegal you are barred from holding any executive position.

I think this puts the incentives in the right place, being able to tell your CEO "no, I'm not willing to risk my career for that" I think would be a powerful self-regulating force and also provide cover from who can't afford to say no from being thrown under the bus. It's essentially professional licensure but reversed.

>If you follow the standard hierarchy

Are you mandating that as part of the law? Otherwise you've just incentivized "creative" non-standard hierarchies. Again, externalities

Ok then lighter version of it - pay it off their compensation (including stock and everything else, not just money), up to 5 years backward.

So if the fuckup is big enough they now owe 5 years of their pay. Should be motivating enough.

I'm good with the fallout from that. Everything will adjust.

> The companies claim that it would impose heavy costs on them.

Which is funny because they spend ungodly amounts of money staffing and fielding the phone calls for cancelation.

The actual cost is literally hooking their almost certainly existing "cancel subscription" api up to a UX for the user. They've already done 99% of the work since these companies all support cancelation.

> Easy solution: impose crippling fines or maybe a little prison sentence here and there for extortion. Why not? That's what it is.

How is it extortion? Who is being coerced and how?

Pretty sure they directly stated it—the consumer is being coerced. Deceptive tactics to make it hard to stop paying for something you don't want is coercive and deceptive behavior.

Yes, but that isn't extortion. Making something overly difficult is different than threatening or using force.

Ah, I see you've never been sent to a collections agency for charges you didn't make.

You are correct on the pedantic point of whether or not it is “extortion” under existing laws. Laws can be changed and definitions changed. Or use a different term. The essence of the point is clear. Why nitpick on whether or not “extortion” is the correct word?

Because this is HN and it's more important to launch definition critiques than to discuss substance ever. I think half of HN came from the horrible world of high school policy debate

Yeah like the thread yesterday about the teenager that was detained by the airlines -- only legally he was likely never "detained" but we have no good word for the not-legally-detained-but-taken-to-a-room-and-interrogated action that actually happened to him. Since we have no good word for that it becomes trivial for pedants to think they've won an argument while they piss everyone else off arguing over definitions.

I wasted too much of my time arguing that crap. This site is full of book-smart people that are not as smart as they think they are. They just happen to find a bunch of neckbeards who also haven't touched grass in the last week.

Remember, you're talking about a community composed largely of software developers, whose livelihoods are built on their ability to find a missing negative sign in 100,000 lines of code. When faced with a large paragraph of text full of complexity and nuance, they're naturally going to find that one word that's wrong and pedantically nit-pick it to death, ignoring the overall point and substance being conveyed.

Thank you for this. I got a laugh out of it. I particularly liked the 100,000 lines of code line.

Lol this even fits with how they do PR reviews and code critiques. When I submit a long PR for review, I know that none of the comments will be substantive or useful. They'll just be meta-critiques about how the headers aren't alphabetized or private members need to come after public. Not about the actual content.

if you can't even clean the basic stuff up to whatever formal or informal coding standard there is, then why should anyone look deeper?

yes, that stuff is unimportant to function. however, if you are getting such comments it means that there is an established standard, and willfully (or sloppily) ignoring it is the problem.

there's also the problem of bike-shedding. but then again if you take the time to be meticulous, there won't be nits to pick and your "helpful" colleagues will have to find something more substantive to pick at.

> You are correct on the pedantic point of whether or not it is “extortion” under existing laws.

Extortion seems like hyperbole to me. Canceling on Disney+, Netflix, etc. is extremely easy. In fact I cancelled my D+ subscription juts the other day and even though they prompted me whether I’m sure I want to cancel, never did I feel they were trying to trick me with dark UX patterns or making it overly difficult.

So on a spectrum of easy -> misleading -> coerced -> extorted, I am happy to report it was easy.

The post you responded to was about situations in which companies make it hard to cancel. Clearly the person was expressing frustration that for many companies signing up is easy and canceling is hard. They want this situation to be rectified.

No one cares that you had an easy time cancelling a service. You telling us that cancelling D+ was easy is only meaningful if you think this is the case in all situations for all companies and you argue that this is so. As it stand it’s a pointless anecdote.

> You telling us that cancelling D+ was easy is only meaningful if you think this is the case in all situations for all companies and you argue that this is so.

Look, I understand that not all companies are customer centric and I can see you and others feel that you’ve been extorted by some conapnies.

I argued in good faith given the article is literally about D+ and Netflix and the person I responded to said “The companies claim that it would impose heavy costs on them.”

Why would I think they’re not referring to the companies in the article?

The article is about the FTC requiring companies to make it easy to cancel. The article specifically stated that Disney and Netflix are in opposition to this. A person wrote a comment stating that they think companies should face legal consequences for not making cancelling easy. You write that “extort” is the wrong word. Then you say that cancelling D+ was easy for you. None of your posts on this topic are relevant.

They are multinational companies. The fact that one of them behaved correctly in your country does not say anything about how it or the others behave in other countries.

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