New laws to make it easier to cancel subscriptions and get refunds

I always thought the law should be really simple. It should take an average person (independent from the case and a large enough sample) about the same time to pay for something than to refund/return/cancel it. That's it.

I gladly am in Germany and companies are more scared of implementing dark patterns here for canceling products. When I was in the US I dreaded cancelling services because I knew they would make me jump around several hoops and even sometimes require contacting customer support.

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martin_a an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Hah! Try exiting the church in Germany then. ;-)

But besides that it's really okay.

	▲	sunaookami an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Had to pay 35€ to exit and had to make an appointment before 12pm...
	▲	MForster an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Or the GEZ... :-)

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chrisjj an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I always thought the law should be really simple. It should take an average person (independent from the case and a large enough sample) about the same time to pay for something than to refund/return/cancel it. That's it.

Can't be too hard. It's already there for email subs - US CAN-SPAM Act and UK PECR.

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biofox an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Good luck finding out how to contact customer support. The darkest dark pattern of them all.

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stavros 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm worried that this regulation is overreaching and will kill innovation in dark patterns. Yet another example of how Europe trails behind the US by allowing their busybody lawmakers to get in the way of progress. If you can't trick your subscribers into being unable to unsubscribe any more, how will companies survive?

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maplethorpe 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If we don't innovate in dark patterns, China will.

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WesolyKubeczek 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Poor trillionaires, what shall they do? I guess buy a more modest yacht, that’s what. Pure cruelty!

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stavros 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Listen, they're the ones holding our society up. Without the money trickling down to us from all the chefs and cleaners they employ, we'd have to scavenge in the wilderness for voles.

We really should think twice before messing with the lifeblood of our economy.

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afandian 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's all about creating a chain of value. Why should the chefs and cleaners have to expend energy hunting for their own voles?

Far better to allow predators to take them to the cleaners.

(/s for if the idiom doesn't translate to your local language!)

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billynomates an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I can't tell if this is satire. Some people really believe stuff like this.

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stavros an hour ago | parent [-]

And why shouldn't we? Do you know how bad your life would be without Mark Bezos? Where would you derive meaning from, if not the quarterly Amazon earnings call?

Humans are inherently amoral; we need a higher power to give us morality, and the mission statement of Meta is where we should all get our spiritual guidance from.

	▲	6031769 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My life is just fine without Mark Bezos, thanks. Never heard of him. Is he some relation of Elon Zuckerberg?

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EZ-E 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My honest take is: in an ideal world it should become possible to unsubscribe through our bank.

This also would prevent any dirty trick from companies trying to obfuscate unsubscribing.

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chrisjj an hour ago | parent | next [-]

We can already through PayPal, making it easy to unsub. But, guess what, service providers don't like that. Equally they'd not like a bank's solution.

However the payment card companies could handle this by facilitating subscriber to generate a new virtual card for each sub, then to cancel sub, cancel card. They'd need to qualify the current T&Cs which pass a charge through regardless.

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Gigachad an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is possible in Australia via the new PayTo system. But it’s quite new, doesn’t work for international payments and so far not much uses it.

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fontain 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can in Europe, e.g: https://wise.com/help/articles/1CoZht05rHDEJcycXU2RMh/what-a...

	▲	chrisjj an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not quite. "If you'd like to block a merchant and their recurring payments — please go directly to the merchant and ask them to stop recurring charges to your Wise card. If you can't reach the merchant, or they haven't cancelled your subscription after you've asked, you can block future recurring charges to your Wise card through your Wise account."
	▲	SkiFire13 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think that's standardized, it probably only has some heuristic to detect a subscription's associated payments and rejects them. It will not integrate in any way with merchants to cancel the subscription on their side, and in fact they suggest to first trying to cancel the subscription on the merchant side.

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londons_explore an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This needs to be augmented with a new bit of contract law which enables a new type of 'subscription' where the terms are set by law.

Those terms would include things like "payments are monthly, service automatically ends when payments end, etc."

As things stand today, plenty of consumers end subscriptions by blocking payment, which practically works, but opens the doors to a scumbag company bulk chasing all those unpaid subscriptions through the courts and getting leins on millions of homes for $150 each and templated court cases.

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pndy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Don't wanna bite but... Shouldn't this also cover the tv license in the UK?

	▲	amiga386 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It probably will, along with mobile phone contracts and other such things. Crapita already do remind you ahead of time that they're going to start collecting the money for next year's TV license if you already have one, and there's no such thing as a "free trial just enter your card details", you either buy a TV license or you don't. Of course, as is their modus operandi, if you were to cancel your TV licence, they'd immediately start bombarding you with URGENT WARNING: YOU NEED A TV LICENCE TO WATCH TV AND YOU CAN GO TO PRISON IF YOU WATCH TV WITHOUT ONE after precisely 6 months. They do that even if you inform them the TV license holder has died, and remains dead 6 months later, and 12 months later yup still dead and nobody watching TV, 18 months, uhuh, let me check, oh sorry yes mum is still dead, guess she doesn't need the TV license, 24 months yup yup pushing up daisies Crapita, don't think you're going to get a TV license out of her... The humans you talk to are apologetic, but the whole operation is to continually mailshot every address in the country that doesn't have a license in the hopes they buy one. I love the BBC and pay my own license, but someone please round up the entirety of Capita and fire them all into the sun.