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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

There's a funny thing when people don't like something where they can intentionally misunderstand it or impart artificial complexity onto it painting a picture like the rule is hard to comply with. I suppose to variation of a straw man argument. I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web. If you can sign up through the phone you should be able to cancel through the phone. Companies knowingly an intentionally make it harder to cancel than to sign up for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with doing right by the consumer. This is a very good law and it should be adopted everywhere.

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And if you didn't have to click through a bunch of offers to subscribe, you shouldn't have to to cancel.

so in order to unsubscribe from go daddy, you must also opt out of the 9.99/mo virus scanning?

This is actually a hilarious point. Some companies might end up making the sign up process more complicated in order to make clear that their cancellation process is equally "simple"/"easy". I guess godaddy is ahead of the curve on this one.

The HN guidelines ask us to "assume good faith", and I try to do so here. Comments like yours take a good faith question like mine and treat it as if it's being asked by someone who is "intentionally misunderstand[ing]" it.

You say:

> I honestly don't think this is one is hard to understand at all. If you can sign up through the web you should be able to cancel through the web.

If that's all they were trying to do, they would just say that it has to be the same medium. But they don't stop there. They say you have to have a "simple cancellation mechanism" and it has to be "as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent". Then they layer on the same-medium requirement that you think is the only actual requirement.

I've read a lot of rules, laws and regulations in my day (lawyer), so I know that when there are 3 distinct requirements, then you can't just meet one of them and think you're in compliance.

So what language would you use to require parity between making and breaking the consumer relationship? You can always construct situations where a rule is genuinely ambiguous, construct situations where the counter-party is held to an unreasonable standard, or the company is risk-averse and overreacts, or they hate it so much they engage in malicious compliance, etc. Many error-modes. But that is true for every law, which is why you have case law, and why laws get revised. This happens with every law, because they are ALL ultimately ambiguous, and they can ALL be used by malefactors, and they must change in application over time with society, technology and all the rest.

What bothers me most is that these companies are actively deviating from the ordinary, obvious, symmetrical path in order to fleece customers. So to comply with the law is really to stop going out of their way to commit petty, pervasive, stochastic fraud against their customers. That is, it doesn't require positive action so much as negative action. Which makes it even less objectionable.

The other day I went to cancel Comcast. And you know what? I first logged into my acount. From there I could literally do everything instantly - sign up, add services, upgrade, everything - but I couldn't cancel. There was no button, no link, no wording. I had to Google it. And it was a phone number hidden on their website that was business hours only. And I called it and spent ~10 minutes cancelling my service. Comcast had to ideate, design, implement, staff, build organization around this behavior. Its transparently wrong, it's too common, and it's a practice that should be stopped.

I think the most helpful thing is not to add language to the regulation, but to add 4-6 examples that illustrate what is considered to be ok or not ok.

The lack of examples/specificity makes it easier for the government to capriciously enforce this law against companies they disfavor. I'm surprised that on a startup-friendly forum, most of the comments are from folks who are worried about malicious companies, not malicious enforcement.

I totally hear you on Comcast. I've filed FCC complaints against them several times. But these rules apply equally to very small companies, who may not have the resources to make sure that they're in compliance with the spirit and letter of every rule in 50 states and 100 countries.

Is it a small business if they're doing business in every US state or country?

Sure, plenty of startups are small businesses and have customers all over.

> in my day (lawyer)

Ah, that explains everything.

I do believe you're commenting in good faith. The problem is, your profession requires you to be extremely explicit to a degree that nobody else in the world needs.

To a lawyer, there's no such thing as the Spirit of the Law, all that matters is the Letter, so you need incredibly rigid definitions to ensure no loopholes. Unfortunately, to people that don't know you're a lawyer, you asking questions comes off as feigning misunderstanding, rather than demanding a concrete, specific, rigid, and precise definition.

Unfortunately, it's also why people fucking hate lawyers. Ya'll know what a law is supposed to say, but weaponize language in order to invent ambiguity that any sane person would say isn't there, and as a result, a law that should only be 4 sentences ends up being 4 pages full of synonyms in order to make sure there's no loopholes.

When a mom yells at a kid, "Stop jumping on the bed!", and the kid says "I'm not jumping, I'm hopping!", you know that kids is gonna grow up to be a lawyer.

> To a lawyer, there's no such thing as the Spirit of the Law

This is untrue. And when I ask questions like the above, I am wondering what the spirit was they were going for. It's too vague to know.

> Ya'll know what a law is supposed to say, but weaponize language in order to invent ambiguity that any sane person would say isn't there, and as a result, a law that should only be 4 sentences ends up being 4 pages full of synonyms in order to make sure there's no loopholes.

This resonates for people who have never needed lawyers and think that lawyers just make things worse. They certainly can, but they can also make things better by pointing out when things are ambiguous and need to be clarified. Or helping parties realize where their interests align and how they can work together.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

― Upton Sinclair

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